


Moving In for Moving On

by Signel_chan



Category: Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Coping with Tragedy, Dead Parents, F/M, Friends to Pseudo-Siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-27
Updated: 2017-08-25
Packaged: 2018-11-05 11:58:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 32,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11012982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Signel_chan/pseuds/Signel_chan
Summary: To lose a parent to natural causes is one thing. For your living parent to lose their best friend months later and bring said best friend's wife and daughter into the home to try and rebuild is another. The worst part isn't that Inigo and Severa now need to learn how to treat each other like siblings--it's that they're having to deal with so many other things as well.





	1. Chapter 1

Rifling through his wallet for a membership card he hadn’t thought about using in over half a year, Inigo had come up to the entrance to the athletic club before he found it, and as he pulled it out the man at the desk waved him through without actually checking it. This came as a surprise to him, as he had been trained on years of needing the card to be thoroughly examined before he could enter, but when he saw the apologetic look on the desk man’s face as he walked by, he knew exactly why he was being given lenience on the matter. The man’s muttered “I’m sorry” was barely audible, but it stung when it hit Inigo’s ears.

Something told him that this was going to be the most emotionally draining dance session he’d ever been to in his life, and he wasn’t prepared for it. This was especially true when, after he got halfway down to the changing room, he heard his father calling his name from back at the front desk. “Inigo, get back here for a minute!” Chrom yelled, one of his hands cupping his mouth to amplify the volume of his voice. “I need you to let me in!”

“But I need to go change for class,” he grumbled in reply, hopping in place with heavy steps before turning and running back to the desk, pulling his card out again and handing it to his father without any further hesitation. “Okay, now you have it. What are you going to do?”

From behind Chrom a head of long red hair poked out, a scowl on the face belonging to the girl, someone Inigo knew all too well, who was now locking eyes with him. “He’s going to get me in, that’s what he’s going to do right now. Gods, Inigo, were you listening at all when we were on our way over here? Did you bother to question why I was with you?”

“I figured you’d be going to the pool with Lucina, not coming to class with me!” In all honesty, Inigo’s mind had been far from thinking about the members of the group that had walked down to the neighborhood athletic club when they’d been on their way. He’d been thinking entirely about the last time he’d been in the building, the last time he’d managed to drag himself to the dance class he’d been taking for the past few years, and those memories were enough to occupy his mind and keep him from noticing anything else around him.

“Why would I do that? I think she said she’s going to go swim laps and probably go lay outside to get some sun, I don’t want to intrude on her alone time anywhere _near_ the pool. You’re going to a class, me going with won’t be a huge deal.” She stepped out from in Chrom’s shadow and snatched the membership card from his hand, presenting it to the man at the desk, who promptly asked her for her name and relationship to the cardholder. “My name is Severa, don’t you forget it, and I’m his, uh…” Her voice trailed off as she looked between father and son, hoping one of them would give her an answer. When neither of them did, she put on her biggest and fakest smile and told the man, “I’m his kind-of stepsister? I mean, not legally, or socially, or anything like that, but you get me, right?”

The man shrugged and handed the card back, gesturing for her to go on in. “You could have just said friend and it would have worked, he let me in without even making sure I had _my_ card today,” Inigo told her once she’d gotten to right next to him, looking at him eagerly. “Now I bet you’ve made my dad feel all awkward about labels and all that again.”

“He can deal with it,” Severa bluntly said, pushing past Inigo and making him sigh, giving him the opportunity to look back at his dad and wave at him in a quick farewell before running to catch up with the girl. There had always been something about her that had irritated him, and he was a big fan of the ladies, but now that their lives had become what they were, he knew he was going to have to get used to her bossiness and her other quirks, all of which were on full display with how she was taking charge in a situation where she should have had no control.

This was made obvious by how she was leading them down the hall, despite not knowing where they needed to be going, and he had to kindly point her in the direction of the women’s changing room so that he could duck into the men’s and change into his workout clothes as fast as he could. The shirt he was going to wear had been in the bag since he’d packed it after his last time coming to class, and when he pulled it out he was hit with an aroma that instantly brought tears to his eyes. He pressed his face into the shirt, taking in the soft smell of flowers that it held before switching the one he was currently wearing out for it. “I hope I do you proud tonight, Mother,” he whispered into the collar of the shirt, holding it over his mouth as he spoke. “You would love to know I’m still going through with this, even after everything.”

Giving himself a moment to keep himself from crying, Inigo dropped the collar of his shirt and looked at himself in the mirror, forcing a smile to appear happy before he threw his things in one of the lockers and left the room. Severa was already standing outside waiting for him, dressed like she was about to perform some risqué moves on someone, with her tank-top and her incredibly tiny shorts. “Why do you look like you’re about to play some kind of sport, not doing some dancing?” she asked him, giving him a once-over as he did the same to her. “I expected better of you, Inigo.”

“I’m wearing exactly what I have worn to every dance practice I’ve ever attended,” he replied, grabbing part of his shirt right over his chest and holding on to it tightly. “I suppose I could ask the same about you, why do you look like you want everyone to ogle you while you’re floundering around?”

“Floundering around? I’ll have you know that I so can dance, I just haven’t ever been taught to do so!” Huffing at the way Inigo was putting little faith in her ability, Severa glared at him for a moment before reaching out, brushing her hand across his blue hair and mussing it up, and laughing while he scrambled to fix it. “You’re looking like you’re rolling onto a court yet you’re caring about how neat your hair is? What a joke.”

Finding that his hair was about as straight as it was going to get, Inigo mimicked what she had just done to him, but rather than simply brushing across her hair, he grabbed one of her pigtails and ran his hand down it quickly, causing it to crackle and gather static. “Bet you’ll love warmups with your hair a giant disaster,” he told her, hearing her distressed noises as she frantically attempted to rein in its wildly-frizzing ends. “Now come on, the instructor doesn’t like when people are late. Or newcomers, but I think he’ll get over it when you turn around and show him what you clearly think is appropriate to be wearing!”

He started towards the practice room, Severa running to catch up to him as she still worked to get her pigtail back to a non-frizzy state. They entered the room together, stopped after steps inside by a dainty-looking instructor whose presence was making everyone else in the room look hesitant. “Why, this is unexpected,” he said, his voice gruff and completely unexpected from someone of his physical appearance. “It’s wonderful to see you again, Inigo, how are things? We thought you might never come back after…”

“I felt it was about time I tried my hand at dancing again.” Inigo had known this was going to happen the moment he and the instructor met face-to-face, and he was clinging to his shirt as if it was going to give him some kind of strength. “It’s what Mother would have wanted, to see her son gracefully crossing the floor once more. It’s just taken a while to bring myself to be able to come back here.”

“Six months isn’t that long of a time away, given the suffering you went through before her passing.” The instructor turned his sights towards Severa, giving Inigo the chance to sniffle and nod as his thoughts went back to the moments he was speaking of. He didn’t want to dwell on that suffering, he didn’t want to think more about what had taken him from trying to follow in his mother’s career footsteps, he just wanted to get back to something that had always been there for him. So when he heard the instructor ask, “Now who’s this lovely lady you’ve brought with you today?” he knew that everything was about to get explained about the current situation in detail.

“First of all, I have a name, and it’s Severa. Secondly, don’t talk to us like we’re dating or something, that’s weird and I would never date this guy.” Her hands ceasing to mess with her hair, its restoration a lost cause, Severa sized up the instructor and quickly decided how else she’d answer his question, before he could make any follow-ups or move on. “And we _couldn’t_ date at this point, anyway, now that our parents are together.”

Clasping his hands together, not in excitement but in shock, the instructor looked back towards Inigo, who had gone slightly slack-jawed at Severa’s wording. “That comes as a surprise to me, your father must have been so heartbroken at your mother’s passing that I don’t see him as one to move on so quickly.”

“He didn’t, he just offered Severa and her mom a place to live after her dad died last month.” Inigo was still clinging to his shirt, wishing he could handle this conversation like his mother sometimes handled situations she hadn’t wanted to be in: by slipping into the background and disappearing from sight. But he couldn’t do that, he was completely aware, so he took in a deep breath and elaborated, “Her dad was one of my dad’s best friends, so when he died my dad was there to do whatever he could to help their family, even if it meant giving them a place in our house so they didn’t have to keep living in their own.”

“Come on, Inigo, you always make it sound less interesting when you tell it that way. I happen to enjoy making people think our parents have hooked up, makes them really think about things for a minute.” Huffing, Severa rolled her eyes dramatically enough to include actual head-rolling, which sent one of her pigtails flying towards Inigo. He had the thought to try grabbing it and mussing it, but his hands were too tightly clinging to his shirt to allow for it. He was rethinking coming back to dance class after all, especially now that Severa had somehow involved herself in it.

This class was one of the few places he had access to that he could get in tune with what his mother had wanted so badly for him, and it had always been a safe place for him growing up. When he felt less like his classmates in school due to his interests, he would come to class and, back when he was younger, his mother would be there beside him, showing him the same steps the instructor had. As he grew and she fell ill to the point of never leaving home, he would attend the class to remind himself of what she’d given him, something that he hoped would happen once more now that she was gone and he could fathom dancing again in her memory. But Severa had to poke her nose in (undoubtedly at the urging of one of the two adults at home) and now his safe place was going to be tainted by her for the rest of their lives, wasn’t it?

Based on how that one session went, as they were walking out he was certain she wouldn’t be returning any time soon, if ever. Her bottom lip was slightly swollen, busted open in one place from where she’d slipped and fallen into a rail against one of the walls, and his hand was bandaged up from where he’d tried catching her and ended up smacking the rail himself. “I can’t believe the floor’s allowed to be that slippery in there,” Severa grumbled, running her finger over the cut on her lip. “My mom is going to see my face and think you beat me up, and you know what? She’s half-right on that.”

“W-what? I’m not the one that told you to run towards the wall, you chose to do that yourself. You were told to stay where you were because you weren’t going to properly do what was being asked of me, no matter how hard you tried.” Inigo shifted how he was holding his bag of clothes that he’d retrieved from the changing room, instinctively wanting to grab it with his bandaged hand but knowing that he’d cause pain for himself if he did. “I did nothing wrong here tonight, that was all you.”

“You could have warned me that I would slip like that, seeing as you had made it over to that wall for yourself already! Seriously, how are you going to handle having me as your sister if you can’t—“ She was cut off by Inigo turning his head to glare at her, her words falling into nothingness as she read the angered expression on his face.

With her intently watching him still, he calmly (yet snappishly) told her, “You are not my sister, you are not anything close to my sister, just because my father let you and your mother live with us does not _make_ you my sister, please stop referring to yourself like that! I have one sister, that’s Lucina, and that’s it!”

“I wasn’t aware you had such a problem with me saying that. Gawds, next time I’ll just refer to myself as your girlfriend or something, make it a lot more awkward to explain that we’re not dating but we live in the same house.” Huffing after she spoke, Severa waited until Inigo wasn’t glaring at her any longer to add, “I just though, I don’t know, saying I’m your sister would help make what’s going on feel less dark and more fun, I guess? I don’t like remembering that I live with you because we both lost parents, I’d rather think there’s some kind of happy reason for it.”

“You know, following me to a dance class meant for me to get back in touch with one of the few things I shared with my mother isn’t going to make me want to accept any of your ‘happy’ reasons for anything,” Inigo muttered, rolling his eyes in time with her rolling hers. “I wanted to get back to something I love that she taught me, and you had to intrude.”

Taking offense to the idea of her intruding, Severa moved her hand from examining her lip and pointed a finger straight in Inigo’s face. “I didn’t intrude on anything, it was your dad who suggested I come with to see if it was something I could see myself getting into to take away from all the dark stuff that’s been happening. If you have a problem with me being here for this, take it up with him, not with me!”

“I’ll take it up with you, because you’re the one that listened to him!” He batted her finger out of his face with his bandaged hand, feeling the broken skin on his knuckles stinging underneath the wrappings. “Just…leave me alone right now okay? I need some space away from you where I can actually think!”

She looked at how angry he seemed to be, and was going to make some kind of digging remark to anger him further, but the sound of someone clearing their throat behind them caught her by surprise. They both spun to see who it was, Inigo changing his entire demeanor from angry to smiling just to keep appearances up, and he was nearly tackled to the ground for it. Not by Severa, as she was watching the events as they unfolded, and not by the person who’d cleared their throat, as she was still standing a few feet away, looking straight at Severa, but by a blond guy with unkempt hair who seemed insistent on getting Inigo’s attention for something.

“I told him not to do that if we found you two,” the girl standing across from Severa said, shaking her head. “But you know how Owain is, he doesn’t listen to a damn thing he doesn’t want to hear.”

“Hey, I listen just fine! I didn’t think we’d really see these two here, that’s all.” Pulling himself off of Inigo and getting them both back to their feet, Owain scratched at the back of his head sheepishly as Inigo brushed himself off from the collision with the floor. “Mom’s been telling me that Uncle Chrom says you’re still taking everything super hard, and I figured that maybe I could help you out a bit? Get deep into character and make you laugh until you cried happy tears?”

Inigo considered accepting his cousin’s offer of doing one of his insane and obnoxious character bits for the sake of the humor it provided, but then he remembered how much he utterly despised the idea and politely turned it down. “No thank you, Owain. As much fun as you would get from it, I feel I wouldn’t get the same enjoyment. You keep those routines to yourself and we’ll be just fine.”

“Oh, well I mean, if that’s what you really want.” Sounding rather dejected at being told no, Owain turned his attention towards Severa, who scowled now that he was even aware of her presence. “What about you, huh? Would you like it if I—“

“I would rather drink bleach and join my dad in death than sit through five seconds of a single one of your routines.” Severa gave a fake gag, which only made Owain look sadder than he already did. “Seriously? You’re going to be upset that neither of us want to listen to you spew overdramatic crap all day?”

“I’m not upset over it,” Owain said with a sigh, sounding very much contrary to his words. “I just didn’t need you to be so rude about it. At least Inigo did it sorta nicely.”

Severa turned from scowling at Owain to looking at the girl he’d shown up with, who was busier looking at the back of her hand than she was watching her friends interact. “And you thought bringing him here to find us was a good idea because…?”

“I didn’t bring him here, we were meeting up to work out together anyway and then we heard you two might have been around so we finished up and got to looking.” Dropping her hand to look straight at Severa, she continued with, “In all honesty, you really should know that I don’t have any control whatsoever over Owain. He does his own thing and I do mine.”

“Then why the hell were you working out together? Come on Kjelle, this argument’s probably the weakest thing you’ve ever thrown at me, and you’ve thrown a lot of things my way before.” Severa mimed a couple of punches while not breaking her eye contact with Kjelle, who was smirking at the motions. “Just say you came up with this idea and we’ll put it to rest.”

“Wish I could, but I’m telling you the truth. Bet Owain would love to tell you all about why he comes here with me once a week now.” Kjelle motioned towards the upper part of one of her arms, which she started tracing an invisible design on with her finger. “Or, you know, you could just accept that we’re here and move on.”

Listening in to their conversation while trying to ignore the fact that his cousin was standing there on the verge of crying for being told to not be so weird, Inigo looked at said cousin and felt like maybe he should be the one to try and fix things. “So, Owain, what’s this about you coming here to work out with someone who could probably dead-lift any of us with ease? Are you playing the role of her weight set?”

“A man such as myself has other reasons to be a gym beyond playing weights for a strong and independent woman like Kjelle, although I would gladly do that for her if she asked me to.” Owain froze after what he’d just said, looking at everyone who was now staring at him for his admission. “Er, I mean, wouldn’t everyone? No one likes an unhappy friend who could break our spines over her legs with ease.”

“Get on with explaining yourself before I do the honors of breaking you first,” Kjelle said, popping her knuckles on one hand and making Owain visibly tense up by doing so.

“Ri-i-ight, well, I’m here because she’s promised to help me out with building some upper body muscles so I can get a cool tattoo on my arm for my birthday!” Flexing one of his arms, the one Inigo knew all-too-well as the one attached to his cousin’s so-called “sword hand” that he blamed a lot of his outbursts on, Owain gestured to a spot on his upper arm that was pitifully thin and covered in a long bruise-like mark that had been there since birth. “Mom said that if I made sure to get the same one that everyone else in the family gets, I’m allowed to do it once my arm looks strong enough to make it work!”

“And therefore he needs someone who actually knows how to build muscles to help him out,” Severa mumbled under her breath, looking at Kjelle who was relaxing her stance on wanting to break Owain for what he’d said. She leaned over and nudged Kjelle in the side with her shoulder, getting her friend’s attention on her so that she could say, “Color me shocked that you weren’t lying about him having his idea himself. Never thought he’d ever be the one to suggest some kind of non-nerdy physical activity.”

In not responding to Severa’s comment, Kjelle chose to not insult someone that was a close friend of hers, at the cost of making Severa nudge her again in an attempt to get her to say something. “Touch me one more time and I might throw you into the gym with me, to see how long you last. Owain’s been working for this for a while, even if you can’t tell looking at him, and I happen to enjoy the time I spend conditioning him.”

“No one enjoys time spent with Owain. No one.” In fact, the entire idea was absurd to Severa that someone could actively want to be anywhere near the guy, but she felt that she was pressing enough buttons with everything she’d already said and done. The last thing she needed was to get more people genuinely upset with her over her mouth.

So she kept quiet, even as Inigo tried talking through the whole idea of getting their family’s symbol tattooed on his arm with Owain. “I know it’s all about covering the birth marks, but that’s kind of hard when the mark’s on your eye, and I don’t know if Lucina or I would like if you could do something our father did while we couldn’t,” he explained, gesturing to his eye and how part of his iris was discolored. “Can’t exactly get the mark plastered in our eyes, even if that would be rather unique.”

“I _have_ to get this though, it would make Mom so happy to see me being a real part of the family for a change. I’m not as refined as the rest of you, I need to cement my place in the family tree!” Throwing the arm he’d been flexing the entire time up in the air, Owain sounded enthused about getting this done, even if Inigo had reservations about the whole thing. They discussed it further for a few minutes, the two ladies getting into the conversation once Owain started talking about his actual workout regimen he was supposed to be doing. Even if the focus was on getting his arm bigger, Kjelle seemed to be making sure that he wasn’t neglecting everything else in his body.

There didn’t seem to be any issues between any of them, until Kjelle offhandedly said, without thinking much about it, “It’s always nice to know that others can make use of what my mother’s taught me. Almost making as if she’s not spent my entire life wasting my time with this self-love and strength stuff.”

“At…least you can use what your mother taught you to some degree.” When Inigo spoke, his hands were gripping at his shirt again, trying to keep himself composed as he thought about what his own mother had taught him while she’d been around. “There isn’t a single soul I know who would be interested in the lessons my mother gave me before she died. No one wants to know about the delicate nature of dancing.”

Listening to him, Kjelle slowly brought a hand up to cover her mouth, her having not realized that speaking about her mom like that would strike a nerve with someone who’d relatively recently lost their own mother. “I didn’t mean to hurt you right there, Inigo,” she apologized, reaching out to him with her other hand but him stepping back to stay out of her reach. “Listen, I did _not_ mean what I might have implied. I just thought, you know, that it would have been okay and…”

“Don’t apologize, I know I’m still being too emotional about something I should be over by now. She’s been dead six months, why do I even care anymore when I think about her?” Leaving his three companions without words, he turned away and started walking towards the door. “If my father comes around, I’ll be out in the garden. Flowers always remind me of my mother’s smiling face in happier times, it’ll cheer me up to be out there with them.”

As they watched him leave, Owain was first to act, starting to run after him before Severa called for him to return, to leave Inigo to himself. “I can’t explain why I’m bothering to care that he’s hurt, but seriously, give him some space. He needs it right now, after what’s happened tonight.”

“I tried apologizing, you all heard me,” Kjelle reminded her, feeling that those words were pointed at what had just gone down between them all. “I didn’t intend on offending him and I guess I forgot that he’s more emotional about mothers now than he ever was.”

“The issue isn’t anything that you said, don’t worry.” Sighing, Severa ran a hand down one of her pigtails, fiddling with the end when she got to it. “I shouldn’t have come and barged in on his attempt at getting back to normal after his mom’s death. His dad thought he was helping me in telling me to come to dance class, but all he did was hurt his son more. And me…it didn’t help me at all.” She shook her head, dropping her hair and turning her back on the two she was still with. “I should go, clearly I’m just burdening everyone by being here.”

“Not so fast, Severa.” Owain’s words came with him grabbing her by the shoulders and trying to hold her down, while Kjelle helped by taking one of her arms and holding it tightly. “You’re not burdening anyone, I don’t think. You need to find a way to deal with what happened to you, just like he needs one to deal with what happened to him. You’re both hurting still, it’s really obvious, and beating yourself up over this isn’t going to help you.”

“Owain’s right, and besides, you don’t have something here like Inigo has the garden. Where are you going to go? The pool area?” Mentioning that sent a shiver through Severa’s whole body, something the two people holding onto her could both feel. That gave Kjelle the idea for a suggestion for what she could do. “Why don’t you just stick with us, until your mom or Inigo’s dad gets here to take you home? We’ll keep you company.”

“No thanks, as much as I’d love to not be alone I think I need it right now.” There was a moment where Severa regretted turning down their offer, as they let go of her and told her to not do anything stupid and to be safe, but she wasn’t going to let them know she changed her mind on what she wanted to do. She chose to be alone right then, and she was going to have to deal with it. The problem with being alone, as she walked away from them and through the halls of the rec center, was that without someone else around her, she was helpless against the thoughts and memories of her father, something she’d tried to keep herself away from ever since she’d found out he’d died.

This was the first time in a month, since the day of his funeral where she finally accepted he was gone, that she was without someone right there beside her, or someone waiting on the other side of the door for her when she locked herself away. This was the first chance those thoughts had to come crashing back at her when she was most susceptible to them, and the very moment she was completely alone she was crying, sobbing about how she felt like a failure about things and how she missed her father so much.

When Chrom came to pick the three kids up within the hour, two of them had puffy eyes from their crying and the third was completely silent, as she’d been since her mother’s passing. He didn’t ask any questions, only reminding them that he was there for them all and that they’d get past the painful parts eventually. How soon eventually was, he wasn’t sure and he wasn’t going to make a guess on it, but he was certain that it would happen when the time was right for it.

* * *

When they got back to the house that now sort of belonged to all of them, the first thing Chrom noticed was that the lights in one of the bedrooms was on, something that he was certain the kids whose room that was were noticing at the same time. “Huh, it looks like Cordelia might be doing some cleaning to keep her mind off things,” he remarked as they all walked up the driveway to the front door, his eyes only moving from the illuminated window so that he didn’t accidentally stumble up the stairs. “She was talking a lot about wanting to get some of that done today. Cleaning, that is, not moving past things.”

“Let me guess, she cried about my dad being dead from the moment you got back until the moment you left?” Severa suggested, not wanting to hear the answer when it came. She knew that was exactly what her mother had done, and it made her feel miserable just thinking about it. There was something about her mother that she was aware of that she didn’t think anyone else had any idea about, that being her mother’s almost obsessive secret love for Chrom that she’d tried to mask with her marriage that had crumbled in death. If there was one thing Severa knew very well about her mother, it was that she wasn’t nearly as hurt by her husband’s passing as she pretended to be, having accepted the death long before it happened and therefore being eager to move on.

There simply had to have been some reason for why Severa had taken to making step-sibling jokes as a coping method, after all. “Er, she did, now that I think about it,” Chrom replied, opening the front door to let his kids and their housemate in, but he stopped Severa while she passed him by. “Say, you don’t have any reason for why you’d mentioned that, do you?”

“Not a single one,” she lied, not wanting to out her mother’s secret to someone who’d been nothing but kind to them in their time of need. “She’s been really teary when she’s been alone with me, figured she’d have done the same to you when she was alone with you. You know I’m the only family she’s got left, and she doesn’t exactly have a lot of friends to lean on like she leans on you.”

“She’s been hit hard by what’s happened, I know, and it’s still rather fresh for both of you. I know I won’t forget her tearful call she placed the day of Robin’s death, she was the most distraught I’d ever heard her.” Chrom gave a small sigh as he saw how Severa shifted where she was standing, her mind going to that very day that he was speaking about. “Not that I want you to go back to that day, mind you. I just…well, I had good intentions here. You head upstairs and see what your mother’s up to, will you?”

She nodded, looking at Chrom’s face and seeing how he was visibly showing signs of regret for what he’d just said. “She’s probably tearing through my belongings making sure I’m not writing anything down anywhere that would make her look bad or something, as an act of rebellion. Jokes on her, I got rid of all those notebooks when we moved in with you.” Her laugh was hollow when she gave it, leaving Chrom looking confused as she walked into the house and up the stairs, throwing her bag of clothes in the hall before entering the bedroom that had always been Lucina’s but was hers now as well. As expected, Cordelia was in the room, but rather than the bag for trash that Severa had figured she’d be carrying with her, she was instead holding pictures in ornate frames. “Uh, Mother dearest? What are you doing in my room?”

“A thing for Lucina, my dear,” she replied, her voice cold and nearly unrecognizable. “The poor girl’s still staying completely silent and I figured she needed something to cheer her up in this trying time. So I found some pictures of her and her mother and framed them, but I have no place to put them for her to look at.”

“Oh yes, because showing her pictures of the person she misses so much is really going to help her out. Never mind the fact that you haven’t bothered doing the same thing for me.” Severa came up right behind her mother, grabbing the top frame off the stack in her hands and scoffing at the picture within it. “I’m not even sure this _is_ Lucina in this. Isn’t the mark in the wrong eye for it to be her?”

Cordelia took a few heavy breaths before speaking, her eyes fixated on the stack of pictures. “I may have mixed a few of Inigo in, I was rushing while putting this together. These children have had to deal with so much in losing their mother and I want to do what I can to help them both heal.”

Feeling like she wanted to grab a big handful of her mother’s stringy red hair and yanking on it hard, Severa closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, thinking through her words before saying something. “Why don’t you worry about me for once, hm, Mother? Why’s it all about Chrom’s children, who have a dad to help them out? Why are you caring more about them than you ever have about me?”

“They don’t have a mother in their lives anymore and I want to try filling that role the best I can. You’ve shown you could do without a mother, so why should I bother?” The slow turn Cordelia made to look at Severa, their nearly identical faces staring into the other’s with malice in both of their eyes. “If you ever wanted me to try helping you again, you should have received the help I already gave you better.”

“That’s not what a mother does and you know it!” Severa snapped, nearly throwing the picture in her hands at her mother’s face. “Why are you like this? You need me just as much as I need you, you shouldn’t be replacing me with kids that aren’t even yours just because you want to be their mom too!”

Without a word, Cordelia brushed past Severa and left the room, taking all her pictures with her and leaving the bedroom exactly as it always had been. Within moments of her leaving, Lucina came into the room, having changed from her pool clothes into her pajamas, and she gave Severa a weary smile as she took her seat at her tiny desk in her room, filling the space Cordelia had previously been taking up. As she wasn’t going to say anything (she had maybe said three complete sentences’ worth of words in the month the two ladies had been living in the house), Severa decided it would be more worth her time to go find someone else to vent at over what had just happened to her.

That someone, naturally, was going to be the living person in the picture she was currently holding on to. Inigo’s room was on the other side of the hall, a much smaller space than the one that she and Lucina were sharing, and he kept it as empty as he possibly could at almost all times. When she saw that he was already inside, she pushed the door open without so much as a courtesy knock, to find him with one leg high up beside him, resting against the wall as he draped his body over it. “So, what are you doing now?” she asked, startling him into leaning back and getting his leg down as fast as he could. “Couldn’t get over your dance class being over?”

“I’m doing what I used to always do with my mother, when she was able to,” he replied, glaring at her for walking in on him. “We would spend hours stretching and working on our flexibility just in case we were ever called up to do actual performances. She was brilliant at what she did, you know, and I wish she was here and well to give me pointers on how to improve what I’m doing.”’

“Sounds boring. It’s almost like if I was wishing my dad was alive so that he could tell me how to formulate plans for companies like he did for his job.” Bringing up her father’s profession came with the attached memory of how he had died mid-presentation at work, his body giving out on him in the middle of a sentence, not to anyone’s surprise as he had been steadily growing sick in the months prior to the event. She wasn’t going to let herself dwell on that memory, however, not when she’d come into the room for something else. “I guess we each handle death differently though, don’t we?”

“Sometimes it’s hard to believe you’ve even lost a parent, given how you never seem to be bothered by talking about it.” Trying to ignore her physical presence in his bedroom, Inigo switched how he was standing so that he could prop his other leg up against the wall to stretch it instead. “I would really like to have some alone time right now, if you don’t mind. You already intruded on me trying to find peace once today, do you have to do it twice?”

Severa opened her mouth for a second, before closing it back up and throwing the picture frame she was holding onto his bed. “You’re right, I’m just being a burden on you, and everyone else in this damn house! Forgive me for wanting to try and make things feel normal for myself!” As she stormed out, he sighed and brought both feet back to the ground, heading to his bed to see what it was she’d thrown onto it.

Looking at the picture in the frame, of his little self snuggled up next to his mother, he could feel tears coming to his eyes. “Oh, you had this to bring to me…” he whispered, feeling regret at how he’d snapped at Severa the way he had. “I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have acted that way right there. Mother, if you’re watching me, I promise I’m not going to always be like that.” The silence that followed in the space he’d been hoping for a beyond-death answer was cut short by the sound of a door across the hall slamming closed, followed by loud, wordless screaming that was quickly muffled by something. It was still audible, and was soon followed by gasps that were indicating crying, but Inigo didn’t want to face what he’d caused and so he closed his own door and sat on the floor for a while, trying to think about happier times that had since passed.

It had been six months, and this had been the first day he’d tried to go back to some kind of normal, but the grasp of everything still wrong had too strong a hold on everyone in the house to make it possible.


	2. Chapter 2

Finding a good balance of what “normal” could possibly be was a lot harder than Inigo ever expected it to be, and he was going into it with the mindset that it was going to be one of the most difficult things he’d have to deal with. The biggest barriers to him finding peace with what had happened came in the forms of the people living in the house with him, having an older sister whose reaction to the death had been to go silent, a father who wanted to make sure his children were adapting as well as they could be without giving them any more of his time than normal, and two newcomers, one of which insisted on trying to become a new mother to him while the other continued acting like she was his new sister.

He wasn’t opposed to Severa trying to cope with her own tragedy in whatever way she needed to, but the moment he got dragged in it had gone too far. “Why are you following me to dance class, again?” he asked her a few weeks after her first appearance, not even looking behind him to see who he was speaking to. “You hated it, and Father said he wouldn’t force you into coming with me anymore because it clearly wasn’t your thing.”

“I’m coming with you because I don’t want to be alone with my mother, and I’m not going to sit at a swimming pool for hours with your sister in silence.” Severa’s answer came without hesitation, without a chance for her to think about what she was saying, and most importantly, without any indication that whatever he said would make her change her mind. “Besides, I told some friends I was going to be here today, and once they come get me I’ll get out of your hair and leave you to whatever you’re planning on doing.”

“Ah yes, friends, such as Kjelle and Owain, who were _my_ friends, or even related to me, first.” That was when Inigo stopped walking and turned to face Severa, as she met him in the middle of the hallway and stopped walking herself. The look on her face was one of surprise, as if she hadn’t expected him to make such a comment to her. “Yeah, you heard me right on that. I’ve known them longer than you and have gotten along with them longer than you, and if you think that just because you’re pretending to be my sister it means they’re going to immediately drop being my friend to be yours, you’re wrong.”

“Why are we talking like that? I’ve been friends with both of them for a long time too, just not as good of friends as you are with them.” Severa watched as the look he was giving her softened, as he realized that she was right and he was overreacting all because she was following him. “Besides, I’m not talking about either of them right now. I do have other friends, you know. Friends that definitely aren’t yours.”

His eyes went wide as he turned around and started scurrying off towards the changing room. “O-okay, I get who you’re talking about now and I don’t think I want to be around for when either of them show up. Have fun!”

“Have…fun? Inigo you idiot, I don’t know who you’re thinking I’m talking about, but you don’t need to be such a scaredy-cat over them being here!” Laughing, Severa waited until he’d disappeared down the hallway to turn around, shaking her head at the conversation they’d just had. She’d known that he wasn’t enjoying how she was inserting herself in places he considered his own, but for him to accuse her of not being friends with people she’d known since childhood was something else entirely. Sure, her relationship with the two people he’d mentioned wasn’t nearly as strong as his with them, but she knew that she could rely on them if she needed someone to talk to. They’d proven that with the last time they’d all been at the rec center together.

But like he had friends outside of those two, she had the same, and the other people that made up their friend circles were vastly different. While Inigo’s other friends were all weirdos and outcasts, Severa had made sure to make friends with other people who were charming, attractive, and likable—or, at least one of those traits at any given time. And she wasn’t sure what it was about her other friends that had Inigo scrambling to get away from her in case they showed up. “It would be nice if he’d explain himself from time to time,” she muttered to herself as she kept walking, passing by the front desk and waving at the man sitting behind it as he watched her path. “I mean, he should know better than to insult one of my friends to my face, but did he really insult them? I don’t even know what he did.”

“Don’t know what who did?” a bubbly and cheerful voice asked, catching Severa by surprise as she hadn’t noticed anyone aside from the man at the desk nearby. It took her slightly turning her head to one side to see two people having had come up beside her, a girl pressing her hands to her cheeks as she looked expectantly towards Severa and a guy with a blank expression on his face. “Ooh, are you talking about Inigo, or someone else?”

“Hit that nail right on the head there, Cynthia,” Severa replied, smiling at her friend as she gave a small cheer for her correctness. “He’s just being weird about me hanging out with you two today rather than stalking him at his dance class. Which, you know, he’d also be weird about me doing again. I just don’t get him.”

“Neither of us get him, why do you think we choose to stay away from him?” the guy asked, remaining emotionless as he spoke. “The only time I willingly approached him, he tried to drag me out on a school night for some kind of ‘event’ he refused to explain beyond the presence of women.”

Cynthia turned one of her hands so that it was a fist on her cheek, which she twisted to mime crying. “Aw, boo hoo, big and scary Gerome got invited to one of the gal hunts and turned it down and uses it to hate someone, what a surprise. I just don’t hang out with Inigo ‘cause some of his other friends don’t really like me and I guess I’m too perky of a girl to be accepted by them.”

“You two are going to be accepted now, since I’m forcing my way into their group.” Severa spoke with a tone of determination, as if she’d come to this conclusion and was ready to act upon it right away. “If they turn you guys down, I’ll just have to take his friends that are _also_ mine and have them hang with us instead.”

“That’s kind of a mean thing to do, don’t you think?” Ignoring that she’d been teasing someone seconds before, Cynthia looked at Severa with a worried glance. “What if he sees that as bullying him or something? Don’t you think your mom or his dad will mind?”

Sputtering for a second as she faced answering the question, Severa ultimately shook her head indignantly, nearly whacking Cynthia and Gerome both with one of her pigtails. “I…don’t care what my mom thinks, and his dad will do whatever he can to make sure I’m adjusting to life without _my_ dad as best as possible! So it doesn’t matter if Inigo thinks I’m bullying him by trying to take his friends, I’m the one who’s having to cope with something that’s happened more recently than his issue, and he can suck it up!”

Exchanging a look between themselves that showed how unconvinced they were with Severa’s plan, Cynthia let Gerome take the reins on what to say. “I think you might be taking this idea of sympathy a bit too far on this one,” he said, with her nodding eagerly next to him. “Why do you have to steal his friends when you can try making us all get along? I say try because there is very little you can do to make me get along with him, but it would be better than starting an internal friend war.”

“Yeah, and maybe you’ll find that with your mutual friends, you two can build a much better friend group together! I know I’ll definitely support you in whatever you decide to do, but I hope you pick what sounds least painful to everyone else.” Grinning, Cynthia glanced towards Gerome to make sure her addition hadn’t been unnecessary; his curt nod more than answered her unspoked question and she squealed.

“I think I see your point, both of you, but where’s the fun in making a compromise and combining our group with his? He’ll just complain that I’m taking over places that belong to him again and you both know it.” There was a moment’s pause, during which Severa looked over her shoulder back towards where the practice room Inigo was going to was. “But at the same time, maybe making all of his friends, not just the ones I already get along with, respect me as a person would make things better in the end.”

Neither of her witnesses were willing to tell her that she’d just corrupted the meaning of what they’d been trying to tell her, and despite being given many opportunities while there together that day they never once brought it up. Severa, once she was stuck in a mindset, was rather hard to get to shift to any other direction, and they were certain that trying to convince her otherwise would result in her lashing out at one or both of them. With them being unable to really get a read on her emotional or mental state, it was for the best that they just let her do what she wanted, how she wanted.

This led, predictably, to disaster the moment she started to act on her word, and that came after some carefully-laid plans and at the hands of the exact opposite of who they figured would have done it. “You know, if we keep adding more people to this group we're going to need to find a bigger table. I'm not going to be the one to start lap-sitting if needed.” Looking at everyone who’d gathered in the lunch spot they’d decided upon, Kjelle did a silent headcount before glancing towards Owain. “I'm nominating you for that position if we end up getting to that point.”

“Why does it always have to be me who has to sit on someone when you start talking like this?” Owain pouted, before shrugging when he saw the no-nonsense look on Kjelle’s face that simply wasn't going to disappear. “Okay, okay, if we find we're out of space I'll do it. But I don't think it's going to happen, why would we suddenly have extra people showing up? It's the same six of us as always, right?”

Shaking her head, Kjelle motioned with one shoulder towards where Severa was sitting, her arms on the table and her head buried in them. “Since when did she normally agree to sit with us? Never, that’s when. And that makes one new person, and wherever she goes her little ‘best’ friend follows, which is two.”

“So that makes...eight of us? Where's the problem, we've got eight chairs right here!” Counting on his fingers, Owain looked to Kjelle for validation but found her shaking her head once more.

“The problem is if anyone else wants to join us. We might be overrun by new faces now that our lunch table’s become Severa’s lunch table.” Giving one final headshake, complete with a glance at the girl she’d just spoken about, Kjelle’s focus went back towards Owain to see how he was handling what she’d said. He was staring blankly at her, mind still trying to process what he’d just heard. “She has another friend that isn’t Cynthia. You know this. We’ve known this for a long time.”

Holding his hand up above his head, Owain was attempting to make a gesture as to about how tall the person they were talking about was, but he found that while seated he was unable to do so. “I still don’t think I see the problem you’re getting at here, Kjelle. She’s our friend, and if she wants to let her friends come sit with us then who are we to stop her?”

“You’re hopeless, Owain.” Kjelle let their conversation die as she watched Severa perk up from where she was sitting, her eyes darting around the dining area as she waited for people to come approach them. “And just what do you think you’re doing, huh? We, as in us and Inigo and all _our_ other friends, decided on eating here today, and the last time I checked with him you were not on the list.”

“Oh can it, I’m just as welcome here as you two are. Besides, who said I wasn’t looking for that sort of-brother of mine anyway?” Her question had a point, as it was completely possible that she was, due to the fact that, for the time being, it was just the three of them sitting at the table. But her deception was given away when Inigo came to the table and looked at her with slight disdain as he took his seat at Owain’s right hand, and she didn’t bat an eyelash at his appearance. She didn’t stop looking around until everyone who had been invited was sitting there, leaving one seat open as Kjelle had said would happen, and when she saw who she was looking for she jumped to her feet.

“Great, Severa’s intruding on something else of mine now, isn’t she?” Inigo remarked, running a hand down his face as he watched her open her arms wide as Cynthia ran into them and Gerome slowly followed, abstaining from the hugging but still watching it. “What are we going to do now, huh? If I tell her to get lost, it comes back to me once we’re home and she rats me out to my father.”

Kjelle smiled, looking at Owain and how he was coming to terms with what he’d been told earlier. “I’ve got this figured out already,” she said, standing up and clearing her throat to get everyone at the table’s attention, even those who were still standing. “Listen here, we’ve only got space for eight people but someone’s decided to let her friends come without warning, which means someone’s got to make a sacrifice.”

“I will gladly leave the presence of everyone here if it means you never speak to me like that again,” Gerome replied, face completely blank as he looked at Kjelle, who didn’t flinch or back down from his dry way of speaking. “You people aren’t exactly my taste, anyway.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” Severa told him, breaking from her hug with Cynthia to join in with looking at Kjelle. “Stop treating me and my other friends like this, you like me so you can like them too. Why don’t you make one of your weird friends go away for this one lunch, huh?”

Pursing her lips together, Kjelle made a quick glance down towards Inigo, who was leaning back in his seat audibly praying that this would end quickly and without any bloodshed, and it was his clear unhappiness with what was happening that made her feel correct in what she was going to suggest. Without so much as a warning, she reached over and pulled Owain to his feet by the collar of his shirt, before explaining, “No, none of the people who were invited are going to leave, and neither are either of your friends. You were off in your own world when we planned this, but we’ve got a compromise to make with you.”

“You’re going to offer Owain as a human sacrifice? That’s rather rude of you, don’t you think?” Severa wasn’t sure where this was going, but the sight of her scrawny friend being held up by his collar was almost impossible to not laugh at. The only thing stopping her from laughing was how serious Kjelle was as she was doing this, and when the joke of a human sacrifice didn’t seem to make her crack, she wasn’t sure if anything possibly could. “Are you going to get around to explaining yourself with this, or are you going to choke him with his own shirt?”

“Yeah, maybe you should explain this, because I’m kind of lost myself.” Inigo had leaned back forward and was trying to make sense of what he was seeing, which really amounted to his cousin being held up by a close friend of theirs, in some kind of retaliation to his pseudo-sister trying to intervene on a lunch that she wasn’t invited to. “From what I’m seeing, you’re planning on using Owain as bait for something, but you haven’t quite gotten to what that might be.”

The other three sitting at the table had all started whispering amongst themselves as to what the plan was, because they too had been absent for the discussion of it, and with every one of their guesses that Kjelle could hear she grew more unsure of if what she was doing was the right thing. But then she heard the lady of the three mention that Owain seemed to be more focused on someone present that wasn’t either of the arguing parties and her mindset changed, accepting that she was doing the right thing after all. “We need someone to share a seat with someone else, because eight seats don’t work for nine people otherwise, and I’ve nominated Owain for the job.”

“I’m not sitting with his sweaty and gross ass, sorry Kjelle. I’d rather eat dirt than have to get that close to him like this.” Despite Owain’s rebuttal that he wasn’t sweaty or gross, Severa seemed to not ever want to budge on her decision to abstain from the threat. And once Gerome had said the same, repeating his offer to leave peacefully and willingly, Kjelle (and everyone who now knew what she was trying to do, given that they’d heard all about how much Severa was butting into Inigo’s space) was sure that they had won the battle.

But Cynthia, eyes full of kindness and wonder, looked straight at Owain with a grin and sealed her fate not just as someone who’d crossed a friendship boundary most people figured wouldn’t be crossed easily, but as someone who was looking into the eyes of someone incredibly focused back at her. “I’ll share a seat with him, if it means we can all sit together and get along,” she said, earning groans and surprised exclamations—as well as one flat _what_ —from everyone present. “I mean, it’s what’s best for everyone here, right? Why can’t we all just try to get along?”

“You’re insane, Cynthia,” Kjelle managed to say after looking at the girl in shock for a couple moments, almost crestfallen that her plan to reclaim their lunch area had failed her so spectacularly. “You do know he’s going to talk your ear off the entire time, don’t you?”

“That’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make in order to save this meal.” Cynthia’s reply wasn’t said as an attempt to brag about what she’d just done, but rather as a way to make everyone think of her as having done a good deed. The problem was, it was a deed no one had wanted her to do, because both sides of the fight had figured they’d get the others to leave; she had, in her quest to be the hero of the group, managed to make everyone have to come together after all, because there was no way anyone was going to back down now.

And so, after the seats had been rearranged and Cynthia and Owain were stuck sharing a chair, him doing exactly as warned and trying to talk to her even when she was trying to listen to what anyone else had to say, there was no clear winner in the whole disagreement. Between the two of them having to share their seat, and everyone’s brilliant plan to make Inigo and Severa sit next to each other, it was not going to be a fun meal for anyone. But as everyone was fearing, this was most likely going to become the “normal” thing that they dealt with every time they all got together for lunch, as one of those steps towards reclaiming a lifestyle that had been shaken up with parental deaths.

For the first few weeks of this arrangement, everyone steered clear of mentioning anything about any kind of parent just to make sure that the situation they’d somehow built wouldn’t come crumbling down faster than they could control. If this was going to be destroyed, it needed to be a planned destruction. If anyone was going to stop the merging of the two friend groups, it was going to be done through something more than a last-minute plan—and after those first few weeks, everyone involved was wondering when the new plan was going to be created.

* * *

The house was completely quiet when the two got home from the most recent of their lunches, something that both of them found odd because there hadn’t been a moment since the two families had moved in together that someone hadn’t been bustling around the place. “I wasn’t aware your mother could get away from this place,” Inigo commented as he unlocked the door, missing how Severa glared at him for his statement. “She doesn’t work, all she does is clean and try and force herself into my life, just like you do.”

“Shut up, will you? She’s coping with things in her own dumb way, which I get is annoying to everyone but herself and your dad, but leave her alone about it! Just let me inside so I can get away from you!” Her whining and complaining only made Inigo take longer to open the door, and when he finally pushed it open she was running inside past him, ready to do whatever she could to get her mind off of the obnoxious behavior she’d had to deal with during their outing. She was completely aware that it was no one’s fault but her own that she had gone to the thing, because no one had ever officially extended the invitation to her, but being able to say that she’d been forced to be there made her feel better about things.

As she went towards the stairs, she could hear a soft sigh coming from one of the rooms, something that stood out against the silence of the rest of the house. Inigo must have heard it as well, because after he closed the door he was hesitantly asking out loud, “Er, Father? Are you in here somewhere? Or maybe miss Cordelia?” The only response he was given was what sounded like a weight dropping onto a table, which he laughed at. “Oh, it’s only you, Lucina, isn’t it? Why are you here right now?”

“She wouldn’t have any friends to hang out with, idiot,” Severa muttered, not caring enough to see what the siblings were going to get up to if they did start interacting. She instead headed upstairs to the room she was living in, finding that her bed was freshly made and that there were clean clothes piled onto it that didn’t seem to be her own. Rolling her eyes, and moving the clothes over to Lucina’s bed where she figured they belonged, she took a few seconds to revel in the fact that her mother cared about her just enough to make her bed for her, before she was ripping the top sheet off to ruin the illusion of cleanliness. “Thanks for nothing, Mother dear, you knew I was going to mess it up again anyway so why bother?”

There wasn’t any response, as she was the only person on that floor of the house, but somehow the lack of an answer angered her further. “Ugh, why aren’t you ever here to snip at me when I start sassing you? Why do I always get to talk bad about you when you’re not around? At least…ugh!” She could feel tears welling up in her eyes without having had to mention the person she was crying over, as a thought about how her father had always been around to witness her being rude about her mother had crossed her mind. If he hadn’t gone and died, there wouldn’t have been any of these changes that had made her feel so isolated despite having plenty of people around her.

Jumping onto the bed, causing the whole floor to creak under her, she flipped her pillow up over her face and pressed herself into it, trying to mask the fact that she was about to start crying again. The last thing she wanted was to have to deal with someone who was alive and breathing while she was mentally wrapped up over someone who was dead, because her thoughts weren’t going to shift off of her father anytime soon. So when she heard footsteps come upstairs, entering the room based on the loudening creaking, she prepared herself for the worst. What she received was someone sitting on the bed beside her, stroking her leg softly without a word.

“Get out of here, I don’t need to deal with you right now,” she said, voice almost completely muffled by the pillow covering it. The person didn’t leave, but more footsteps came up the stairs, which meant that, unless one of the adults had come home in the time she’d been upstairs, both siblings were now up there with her. And if that meant that Inigo was sitting there on her bed, stroking her leg, she needed to take action, and quick before he tried to do something weird.

Swinging the pillow to whack the person sitting next to her was the only idea she came up with, and so it was the one she did…and she was greeted with seeing that Inigo was standing in the doorway, looking at her with a glare as she forcefully hit Lucina straight in the face with a pillow. “What the hell’s that for? Lucy came up to check on you because she thought you were crying, and you’re beating her up? Do you _want_ her to hate you or something?”

“I thought she was you, and I’d love to beat you up, so I did what I thought was right.” Her voice wasn’t showing that she felt bad about hitting the wrong person at all, but when she dropped the pillow and saw Lucina’s stunned reaction to what had happened, tears were welling up once more. “Oh gods, I didn’t mean to hurt you if I did! I really thought it was Inigo touching me, and you know how I feel about our brot—“

“Don’t call me your brother, the only sister I have is Lucina and nothing is ever going to change that.” Turning where he stood to head towards his room, Inigo slammed his door to let the girls know he was done with them and whatever they were doing, leaving Severa nearly crying in front of Lucina, who was still trying to process how she’d ended up with a pillow slammed into her face.

She reached out to her friend, brushing her blue hair out of her face after it had been ruffled from the pillow. “I really didn’t mean to hurt you, Lucina. You’re actually a decent person, unlike your brother, and…I don’t know, I guess I thought he’d be skeevy enough to try touching me like that? I didn’t really think it could be you, you’ve done your best to try and stay away from me unless it’s time to go to bed, because then you have to share a room with me and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Across the hall, things were being yelled in Inigo’s room, but neither of them could hear the specifics of it, no matter how hard they wanted to hear what he had to say. When his door came back open, he poked his head in his sister’s room once more, having changed his clothes into something more fitting for physical activity rather than time with friends. “I’m going to meet up with Owain down at the gym, to help him out. Neither of you better follow me or I will throw you in the pool.” The words were spoken while glaring directly at Severa, who shrank back at what he had to say, but before she could retaliate he was slamming the door closed and stomping down the stairs.

Lucina sighed, not resuming her stroking of Severa’s leg until after they both heard the front door to the house slam closed just as her bedroom door had. Judging by how heavy her breath had been, it was clear that she was distressed to hear her younger brother storm out like he had, and it made Severa want to spring into action, even if she didn’t really care for Inigo—this would have been for Lucina and only Lucina. “Listen, I didn't mean to make him leave alone, I'll go chase him down if you want me to!” she told her, reaching to grab her arm to pull her hand away. “He won't like it, but it's what your dad would want me to do.”

Shaking her head in reply, Lucina looked towards the book she'd brought up into the room with her, one titled something about stages of grief. “We all go through it differently,” she quietly said, her voice steady despite how much she hadn't used it of late. “And my brother, he needs time to accept and to get past.”

“Walking to the rec center by himself isn't accepting or getting past anything.” In her mind, Severa was mockingly repeating what Lucina had said, as she didn't believe a word of the advice that was being spouted at her. It had been close to seven months since they'd lost their mom, they should've been over it! Her dad had barely been dead two months and she only got emotional about it sometimes anymore. These two weren't coping with their loss very well at all, and she was certain that hearing one of them justifying the other walking through the neighborhood alone as a means of acceptance was just a bunch of nonsense.

“He’s surrounding himself with people he trusts, that’s his way of moving on. It’s taken a lot to get him to open up to others already, him opening up once more now that Mother has passed is important in his healing process.” Tapping the cover of her book, as if she was implying Severa should look into it to understand what she was saying, Lucina sighed again. “And with me, I need to do what he’s doing and start opening up again. It’s been tough being trapped inside myself, becoming unintentionally timid around others just because…well, it’s the part of Mother that seems to have stuck with me.”

“Oh boy, I wish I’d gotten part of my dad to stick with me when he died. Like maybe the part that could actually tolerate my mom.” Rolling her eyes, Severa was trying to pretend like she was eating up what Lucina was telling her, but she really felt like it was a waste of her time to be hearing this. This was a dysfunctional family that had a lot of issues they needed to resolve, and they weren’t doing much to fix any of them at the current moment. “Listen, Lucina, I’d love to stay here and listen to how you going mute on everyone is how your mother’s come back to you, but it just doesn’t make sense.”

“That’s your opinion, and while you certainly are entitled to it, it isn’t what I said.” Shaking her head as she watched Severa give a fake gag and roll her eyes even more dramatically than the first time she had, Lucina grabbed her book and opened up to the page it had been creased on. There were notes written in the margin on both sides of the page, as if she’d spent a lot of time going over those specific passages. “What I said is, my reluctance to speak to others, my timidness, my feeling of being trapped in my own mind, is what stuck with me. Not something that she’s come back to me with. What I took away from her.”

Leaning in to read some of the notes that had been written, Severa got as far as noticing that they seemed to be lists of observed habits people had retained from their departed love one before Lucina snapped the book closed. “Okay, but what’s your point with all this? Your mom was some kind of shy and withdrawn person, you became withdrawn after she died, so what? You’re not going to sit here and tell me that Inigo’s the same way, are you, because he really isn’t. He never has been, not as long as I’ve known him.”

“He certainly did crawl back into his shell around most people for the longest time after Mother died, and he gave up on so many things that she did with him, simply because it was too painful to remember her while doing them. As I said, he’s slowly coming around to being the same person he’d been right before she died, rather than how he’d been when we were kids.” Lucina looked Severa in the eyes, hoping that it would appear as if her point was finally coming across, but when she was greeted with a few slow blinks and a yawn, she came to the conclusion that trying to explain further would be useless. “I’ll return to my reading and solitude, since you don’t seem to need me around anymore,” she said, standing up and leaving the room with her book in her hand, giving Severa all the time in the world to say something to keep her from going but never getting any kind of response.

When the bedroom door gently closed upon Lucina’s departure from the room, her exit much quieter than her brother’s had been, Severa fell onto her side, her head hitting her pillow as she let out a long-held breath. “Why do I keep pushing everyone away like that?” she asked herself, bringing her legs up onto the bed so that she could curl as close into a ball as possible. “Like, I get it, everything’s screwed up for all of us, but why can’t I actually let them in when they try to get in? Why do I keep telling them no, to get lost, to leave me alone because I want to be alone?”

She blinked once, her eyes already tearing up again, which made her feel even weaker to what was happening around her. “I’m just a huge burden on them healing, and they’re trying to help me heal and I won’t even let them get a shot at it! I’m going to spend the rest of my life hating everyone around me because I let one bad thing ruin my life!” Choking up with her last few words, she brought a hand up to brush tears from her cheek as they rolled down it, but stopped herself when she could have sworn she felt something else touch her face, not wiping it down but gently caressing it, as if telling her everything was going to be okay.

It certainly _wasn’t_ going to be okay, not anytime soon, and she was completely aware that it wasn’t going to be. She had accepted that her life was completely turned on its side from the moment she’d heard her father had collapsed while working and hadn’t been able to be revived. She knew that it was going to take time to learn to get over the lack of his presence in her life, and she needed to start working towards getting back to a new kind of normal. Lifting her head feebly, she looked around the room at everything that belonged to Lucina, neatly organized and stored exactly where it was meant to be, before turning her attention to her own belongings, haphazardly thrown in the corner and still not unpacked from when she’d moved in.

A seed planted itself in her head, as an attempt to take that first step to reclaiming her life after tragedy, and with the quietness of the house completely noticeable as she worked, she pieced together a makeshift organization of her things on the side of the room that was considered hers. It was cathartic as she went through keepsakes that had ties to the happier times she missed, because every time she saw something she knew her father had given her, she would pause to think about how happy he’d been to pass it onto her when he’d come back from wherever his job had sent him that week.

Her task wasn’t finished when she heard the bedroom door creak open, but she looked up from the pile of clothing she hadn’t touched in nearly two months to see the face of someone who definitely did not live at the house staring in at her. “Oh hey, you are in here! Inigo said he wasn’t sure if you’d be here, or off dead in a ditch somewhere, but I figured it wouldn’t be quite right if I didn’t check to see if you were here first,” Owain told her as he pushed the door open further, not seeing that Severa’s face had soured when she’d realized it was him standing there. “Listen, I know you don’t like when I get storytelling-y, but you’ve got to hear me out on this one, okay? So there we were—“

“You said it yourself, I don’t like when you do that. Short sentences, small words, tell me what you want from me.” Two of her fingers pressing together as she held up her hand in front of her, demonstrating what she meant by what she said, Severa continued separating and re-pressing the two fingers until Owain’s blabbering had stopped completely. “You didn’t hear me, did you? I don’t care what you have to say unless you’re not talking like a total buffoon while saying it.”

“I wasn’t even talking like a buffoon! I was just telling you that Cynthia was out walking through the neighborhood, while me and Inigo were on our way here, and she was wondering if you were okay because you weren’t with us. That’s all.” He continued standing there, waiting for Severa’s reaction so he could add anything else, and so when she raised an eyebrow at him, he tacked on, “Okay, she didn’t exactly approach us about it. I, being the dashing savior I am, approached her and asked if there was anything she needed, because she was looking distressed and frantic, like a lost kid.”

“Distressed, huh? Sounds like Cynthia’s got some kind of problem she’s working through. Er, thanks for the information, but I think I got this from here.” Her hand gesture turned from her annoyed one to a quick thumbs-up, something that Owain flashed back at her before he excused himself and closed the door on her once more. The moment she was alone again, she shook her head and moved to look out the window out towards the street, where she didn’t see a single person outside as far as her vision could carry. “Or maybe Owain’s a lying piece of garbage sent up here to…ugh, no, why would he do that? Dude’s some high-and-mighty ‘noble’ guy who just wants to be everyone’s hero. He wouldn’t lie like that.”

There was really only one course of action she could take about this, and she wasn’t going to hesitate to take it, not when the well-being of one of her best friends was at stake (or at least in a position of being questioned). She made sure she looked decent before heading downstairs, finding Lucina, Inigo, and Owain all sitting at the kitchen table, the two boys talking while Lucina was reading her book. “Say, either of you numbskulls want to tell me where you saw Cynthia out walking?” she asked, hoping that she’d get an answer she could work with.

“She was leaving the neighborhood, that’s what she told us,” Inigo answered, not giving Severa so much as a glance as he spoke to her. “Don’t go out there chasing her down, it’s not worth it. She’ll be fine, and you can talk to her before the next time you intrude on one of my days out with friends. Which, by the way, you’re still not welcome to join us.”

“Cynthia is though,” Owain chimed in with, grinning as he did. “She’s really nice to us, and she even told me earlier that she likes hearing my stories because of how great they are. I’m not going to say no to someone wanting to hear me weaving tales of valiant heroes striking out on their own in the world!”

Groaning, Severa gave the two guys both a glare that showed she didn’t care about the unhelpful parts of their answers, and she did exactly as she’d been told not to do: she went out to chase Cynthia down, just to make sure her best friend was okay. And she was, she was found right outside the neighborhood at a little shopping center, sitting in front of a café with a big cup of water in her hands that she was drinking from.

Her explanation for what had been taken as her being distressed was that she’d been trying to ready herself for asking some places for job applications, and she came across the two guys at the wrong point in her preparation. “I didn’t mean for them to go home and worry you into thinking something was making me upset,” she said, sounding sheepish before she took another drink from her water cup. “But now that you’re out here with me, want to help me out? Most places aren’t interested in me ‘cause I’m so young, but my mom insists I get a job to help me understand the world a bit better.”

Severa gave a quick glance around the shopping center, seeing what places were in the area that might have had any interest in hiring someone like Cynthia, and when she saw nothing that felt promising she had the thought to turn down the offer. Ultimately, though, she decided it would be best if she did accompany her friend for at least a little bit, because it was getting her out of the house, away from everything that was upsetting her, and it would allow for her to try and make a difference in someone’s life.

They were out for a few hours, going into all sorts of different places within walking distance of the neighborhood, and when all was said and done they _each_ had a stack of job applications to fill out, because many of the places had given Severa one even though she hadn’t been the one asking. She didn’t intend on ever filling any of them out, not when she didn’t really need a job at the moment, but there were some that, after reading the job descriptions, sounded kind of like they’d be interesting to try out for a couple days. Applying for those places as a joke wouldn’t be a bad thing, would it?

When the joke for one place turned into an interview, that turned into an actual job, it might have been a bad thing after all, or at least a new experience to try and bring Severa’s life back into some kind of normalcy. With Cynthia also having gotten hired at the same place, they were going to have each other there for their first job, which was nothing but a recipe for disaster as they weren’t ever going to be able to focus on their work when they had each other as a distraction—and from the moment he’d heard this was happening, Inigo felt it was time to get payback on his unwanted housemate for her trying to crash his friend group. All it was going to take was something big enough to really distract the girls from their new jobs, and he was certain he could come up with something that would work. He just needed the pieces to fall into place, which he knew would happen the moment he asked for them to.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There, I think that's enough "setting up the plot" to finally get moving to where I want this fic to go. I'm trying to balance a focus between Inigo and Severa in the story (the first chapter was more focused on him, and this one on her), and now hopefully I can maintain that until I reach the conclusion of the story, something I haven't really pieced together yet!
> 
> it's going to be an adventure for all of us, y'all c:


	3. Chapter 3

The morning started with a loud knock at the bedroom door, something that Severa rolling over in her bed to see if Lucina would be the one to call for whoever was there to leave them alone. But Lucina seemed to have already been awake, as she wasn’t in her normal spot, which meant that if anyone was going to deal with the visitor, it was going to have to be Severa herself. Or the person could let themselves in without being invited, and that’s ultimately what happened.

“Severa, dear, you need to get out of bed before noon, we’re going out for lunch as a family.” If there was one thing Severa hated more than being intruded upon while she was trying to sleep, it was her mother coming into her room and disturbing her. Even the mention of food wasn’t enough to get her to greet her mother with anything other than a scowl. “Yes, I know, you would much rather sleep than deal with me. But we have things to celebrate, and you coming along is important.”

“I’m not going if it means you’re going to be there,” Severa replied, rolling back over to try ignoring her mother’s presence. “You’re either going to gripe at me for being a disappointment to my father, or you’re going to fawn over Chrom and his children and forget I exist, and I’m not down for either of those things.”

“Then what if I promised you that neither of those things were going to happen?” Cordelia came into the room and chose to sit at the end of Severa’s bed, taking into account that if her daughter wanted to, she could kick her off easily, and therefore chose to sit on her feet. “Which they won’t, I don’t know why you insist on thinking that I’ve forgotten about you, or that I’ll focus on them over you, or—“

Despite her feet both being sat on, Severa tried kicking her mother away from her, and when she failed she grabbed her pillow and chucked it at her mother’s face. “You have done nothing but focus on them since we moved in here! Is that your way of getting over losing the love of your life, huh? Is it?”

“Severa, I don’t like how you’re speaking to me right now.” Stiffening up as she straightened her hair from where the pillow had mussed it up, Cordelia softly tutted at her daughter’s belligerent behavior. “I will never forget what your father and I shared, and I will never get over him or love another like I loved him, but Chrom…” She sighed, almost dreamily enough to made Severa grimace at the sound and regret that she’d already thrown her pillow. “My point is, Chrom has done us both a huge favor in opening his home to us in our time of need, and I am trying to show him respect for doing so.”

“More like, you’re trying to get him to fall in love with you, but whatever.” Severa tried getting either of her feet unstuck so she could use them to push her mother away, but when she was unsuccessful once more she leaned up just to slam her whole upper body down onto the bed. “I’m not going with you, no matter how much you beg me to. Go have a nice meal with your new family and forget about me!”

Cordelia looked over at her daughter and shook her head, before standing up and excusing herself from the room. The moment she closed the door after getting into the hallway, she could hear Severa yelling loudly, cursing and berating both herself and her mother for what had just happened. Had Cordelia not gotten used to her daughter acting like this every single time something inconvenienced her, she might have thought about going back in and trying to talk things out, but Severa wasn’t going to believe that she was anything but right. They could go back and forth for hours and there would be no conclusion.

With that in mind, she went downstairs to see Chrom, Lucina, and Inigo all standing around the front door, waiting for her to have brought Severa down with her. “She refuses to come if I’m the one asking her,” she explained when she saw all three of them giving her confused looks as to why she was alone. “Says I’ll just forget about her and that I don’t really want her there. Any of you want to go talk sense into her to see if we can get her to come along?”

Chrom looked uncomfortable at the suggestion, nudging Lucina to try and get her to step forward, but when she shook her head in denial Inigo sighed and did the honors. “I’ll try my best,” he said, giving both his father and his sister a side-eye as he walked towards Cordelia, “but there’s no promises that she’ll listen to me. Severa doesn’t like me much, you see.”

“I’m aware of the fact. Severa doesn’t like very many people at all.” Cordelia opened her arms into an offered hug for Inigo, but he politely turned her down with a smile, her arms dropping to her sides as he started up the stairs. “Good luck, and don’t tell her why it is we need her to come with us!”

Slowly walking up the stairs as he mentally went over what he could possibly say, Inigo muttered under his breath, “Oh yes, because keeping the reason secret is going to do wonders at getting her to believe me. You must not know your daughter well at all, miss Cordelia, if you think lying to her is the best way to get through to her. Why, if I knew any better, I’d suspect that you haven’t done anything to convince her otherwise on her suspicions of you wanting to forget about her!”

He chuckled, forgetting for a moment that he was trying to make his ascent to the upper floor as unnoticeable as possible, but when he took a stair too hard and the door to the girls’ room came flying open, Severa’s head poking out around the frame, he knew he’d failed. “What do _you_ want?” she snapped, glaring at him. “I’m not coming with you, if that’s what you’re here for. Already told Mother dear that, figured she would have passed the so-called good news along.”

“It’s not good news, we would rather know that you’re out with us and enjoying a nice meal as this hodge-podge family than know you’re drowning in your own anger and sorrow here at the house.” He held out a hand for her to take, one that she looked at in disgust. “Come on, Severa, stop being such a bitch just this once and let us in.”

“I’m not even being a bitch this time, I’m being realistic!” Fake spitting as she turned her eyes from Inigo’s hand to his face, her glare softening just slightly enough for him to notice and crack a smile at her, she hesitated for a second before ducking back inside the bedroom, albeit without closing the door. “And realistic me knows that this is a trap to make me witness you and Lucina be coddled by my mother while she ignores the child she gave birth to, so I’m not even bothering.”

Following her inside, Inigo shook his head as he saw Severa bounce back onto her bed, trying to ignore that he’d come into the room with her. “That doesn’t sound very realistic to me, now that you’ve come out and said it,” he chided her, shaking a finger in her direction. “In fact, if you had to ask me what I think of your behavior, I’d tell you that I think you’re doing this as a call for attention.”

“Wow, no one asked you, and even if someone had, you’re stating the obvious.” This was the point where in a normal conversation with Severa, the other person would get tired of her antics and walk out on her, just like her mother had, but Inigo felt like abandoning her was just going to push this onto someone else’s shoulders later. Why would he classify her as a problem that someone else needed to solve some other time? She was a childhood companion, even if she had bullied him from time to time, and now they were living under the same roof, the least he could do was try to steer her right.

“Severa, I know you’re looking for attention. We all know it. Lucina knows it, she hears you grumbling before bed every night about various things. Our friends all know it, they’re aware you think you need to be the center of everything all the time. My father knows it, and he’s tried to help you whenever he’s had the chance. Remember him suggesting you come to dance class with me?” Tapping his chin as he thought of the best way to draw the person that had caused this issue into the conversation, Inigo added, “And your mother most definitely knows it, but I believe she sees you as too much of your father’s child to want to be close with you right now.”

“Great, so because I was made with the wrong guy she wants nothing to do with me!” Giving a fake sob, Severa dramatically threw herself against the wall next to her bed, banging her fists on it a few times for good measure. “If I was your actual sibling she’d love me like she loves you and Lucina, but because I’m only your fake sibling she couldn’t be bothered to care about me one bit!”

Gritting his teeth and reminding himself to stay calm, because the fate of the family lunch hinged on how he handled this conversation, Inigo had to take a few breaths before he could bring himself to say anything. “She cares about you, she’s just…distancing herself from you as a way to cope. Lucina’s spoken to you about coping methods, hasn’t she?”

“She has, but what kind of parent copes by blocking out their only child they’ve got?” Severa peeled herself off of the wall to look at Inigo, who shrugged at her. “Exactly, you’re just making excuses for that sad waste of a woman. She wishes she was your mother and not mine, and now that she doesn’t have a husband and your dad doesn’t have a wife she’s going to take exactly what she wants.”

“If she so much as tried, Father would first deny her anything, and if for some reason he failed to do so Lucy and I would be there to stop her. We don’t need a replacement mother in our lives, and I would hope that your mother respects that.” When Severa opened her mouth to give a rebuttal before he was ready for it, he shushed her, causing her to recoil in shock, blinking a few times to make sure she had really just seen him do what he’d done. “I don’t want to hear another word of your self-inflicted pain, not when you are ignoring everything I am standing here telling you.”

“I’m not _ignoring_ it,” she cut in, getting her words out before he could shush her a second time. “I’m just not buying a damn word of it. Because you don’t know my mother, you don’t know how she is, you don’t know what her plan with this family is.”

“You don’t know what her plan is either, that’s what I’m trying to get you to understand. All this time, when you’ve been locking yourself away from the rest of us, she’s been opening herself up, letting us know that she’s not here to replace our mother but rather to get help supporting herself and you now that you’re alone.” What Inigo was saying didn’t sound real to Severa, not with the mental image of her mother she’d so carefully constructed over the past two months, and she was quick to cover her ears to block out the rest of it. But when she saw the defeated look on his face, she realized that she was doing exactly what she had just said she wasn’t: she was ignoring what he was telling her, because it didn’t fit with her personal narrative.

As she pulled her hands off her ears, she could clearly hear him sigh and mutter, “I don’t know why I’m even bothering at this point, you use us being a family as a joke but honestly you’re more scared of that happening than anything else right now.”

“Since when am I scared of that?” Sitting up tall to look at Inigo, him unaware she’d heard what he’d said until she replied to it, she narrowed her eyes when he was unable to immediately give her an answer. “I’m not scared of becoming a family with you guys, I’m scared of my mother replacing me with you and your sister. That’s what I’m scared of. I’ve always known how fond my mother is of your dad, everyone knew it. Even my dad knew it, he’d always make jokes about it and we’d laugh because when would she ever get the chance to make that move? To replace him and me with your dad and you and Lucina?”

“She won’t ever have that chance, not as long as my dad has his sense about him and as long as Lucina and I are alive.” Stepping closer to where she sat, Inigo bent down to get on eye-level with her and smiled. “We’re just as adamant about not getting a new mother as you are about not losing the one you have, don’t worry.”

Severa looked into Inigo’s eyes, pain visible in them as he tried to hold eye contact with her. “I don’t think you’re telling me the truth here,” she said, loosening her glare so that she didn’t seem like she was still upset with him. “I mean, I hope you are, because if you’re not you’re just a huge jerk, but I don’t think you’d turn my mother away if she tried hard enough to get to be your mother.”

He shook his head, before standing back up and heading for the door. “I’m not going to argue with you on that any longer, it’s not true and you need to accept that. Now get ready to come out with us, everyone’s waiting downstairs for you and we’d like it if you’d join us.” With that, he left the room and made sure the door was closed shut behind him, heading down the stairs without any regrets as to what he’d just done. He might not have convinced her to come with, but he hoped he’d done a number on her mindset regarding the whole mixed family thing, which in turn would make her more likely to join them for lunch.

“So how did it go up there, son?” Chrom asked once Inigo reached the bottom step, the boy shrugging in response. “I see. You were up there for a while, we heard some knocking, figured there might have been some progress made. Oh well.”

“Severa’s always been one for being difficult when things aren’t exactly to her liking,” Cordelia reminded him, giving a small smile as she looked in Inigo’s direction. “There’s no use in guilting your son into thinking he didn’t do enough to convince her, not when it’s nearly impossible to change her mind on most things.”

The sound of someone coming barreling down the stairs put a stop to the discussion, and when Severa jumped and landed at the bottom of the staircase, everyone was left in a stunned silence. “What was this about a lunch?” she loudly asked, as if she hadn’t been the sole obstacle in everyone leaving. “Count me in, as long as someone’s paying for it. I don’t have the money to buy myself food.”

“Not yet, anyway,” her mother said, waggling a finger at her with a knowing smile. “Count this as the last big meal we treat you to before you start paying for yourself, miss ‘I got a job without needing one’. Guess you get to learn what it’s like to be a real adult for a change.”

“I…what?” That was news to Severa, and she was predictably taken by surprise by it. “No one told me that once I got a job I’d have to start paying for myself! I’m still in school! You can’t make me do that!”

“This was something your father and I had intended on introducing you to soon enough, so when you took the initiative to get a job before I had any say in it, well, it became time to let you know!” Cordelia looked towards Chrom, hoping he’d back her up in her decision, but he was staring blankly at her, as if he couldn’t understand why she’d force her daughter to pay for herself at such a young age. “You would do the same with your children if needed, wouldn’t you?”

He shook his head. “Not likely. I wouldn’t force my children to pay for themselves until they were at least out of school, if even then. I wasn’t forced to fend for myself until after Emmeryn had passed, and even then I didn’t make Lissa take care of herself until she was ready to go off on her own. Can’t imagine forcing either of my kids to work right now.”

“We both believe in much different parenting styles then, it seems. Means that trying to mesh them together would never work.” Beaming, Cordelia’s eyes tracked back to Severa, the girl slowly moving back towards the stairs to escape what was happening, and her face fell when she saw her daughter stiffen up under her watchful eye. “But don’t worry, if you’re worried about something right now. Just because I won’t pay for you on outings like this anymore doesn’t mean you’re left out in the cold. It’ll be a gradual thing.”

Severa didn’t want to believe a word of it, but she sighed and let her shoulders hang when she decided that doubting her mother on this one might have been a bigger problem than she wanted to get into. “All right, I hear you. I get one last good meal before my checks start paying for them instead. It’s…not fair, but I’ll handle it.” She sighed again, looking back up at her mother and forcing herself to look excited while doing so. “Okay, where are we going to go then?”

* * *

That same evening, after sneaking away from the other people living in the house to get some time of his own, Inigo found himself at the rec center surrounded by a couple of his friends, which hadn’t been his intention at all when he’d shown up. It wasn’t a night where there was a dance class happening, so he hadn’t come prepared to change for any sort of activity, but when he walked in the doors and saw a dear friend of his being badgered by his cousin over going into the gym with him, he couldn’t resist getting involved with whatever it was they were doing. Owain was always a great person to spend time with, and their friend Brady—whenever he wasn’t under his mother’s thumb—made a lot of situations better just by being there.

Nothing, however, could make the sight of Owain struggling to lift weights that others were carrying with ease better. “I promise, I’ve done this before,” he assured the two people watching him, as his arms shook just trying to lift one of the weights from its resting place so that he could start using it. “The last time I was here, Kjelle made sure to put it on the bar for me but from there it was all me doing all the lifting.”

“Something tells me she lied to you about how much you were lifting,” Inigo told him, eyeing his struggle and taking his story with a grain of salt. “You’re getting a better workout trying to lift that thing than I think I’ve ever seen you get, and all you’re doing is failing.”

“She wouldn’t have lied to me, why would she do that?” Stopping his attempt to lift the weight as he was recognizing it as futile, Owain gave a tired sigh as he took a seat on the bench he had intended on using once he got the weights situated. “You know, she’s always so much better at helping me out in here than either of you are, all you’re doing is crushing my dreams and telling me I’m not as good as I think I am.”

“Yeah, well, we ain’t gonna sit here and do the lifting thing for you, which is what she had to have been doin’ if you ever lifted that much in one go.” Standing up (and proceeding to tower over his friends, because he was easily the tallest person either of them knew, all adults included), Brady walked to the collection of weights and crouched down to take a look at them for himself. “See, I think if you’re really wantin’ to do some liftin’ while it’s us you’re here with, maybe ya should stick to the baby weights.”

Blowing out a breath to show his hatred of the idea, lips flapping together for a moment, Owain shook his head. “No way! If I’m going to get that tattoo anytime this decade, I’ve got to be making real manly gains, not baby ones!”

“I’m gonna be blunt with ya, I don’t even think I could lift half of these things without someone helpin’ me, there’s no way you’ve done it with bein’ so scrawny.” To demonstrate his point, Brady tried lifting the exact same weight Owain had been struggling with, and while he got it a few inches up off its stand, he had to drop it almost right away. This led him to conclude, much to Owain’s dismay, “If ya ever were liftin’ this one, Kjelle had to have been helpin’ ya out, but even still, I don’t think she could carry it either.”

Questioning her strength made Inigo realize that he had something to add that could be a counterpoint to Brady’s comment, allowing for Owain to save at least a little face. “I don’t know, she is able to deadlift each and every one of us without a struggle. I can’t tell you how many times she’s thrown me over her shoulder simply because she could…”

“That’s different, and besides, the only time she’s done that to me was when we were at that pool party a couple years back. Makes your point kinda invalid, don’t ya think?” Brady was right, it did invalidate the suggestion because it was infinitely easier to hold someone in water than it was entirely on land, but it got the gears in Inigo’s mind turning.

Before he could act on what he was thinking about, though, he had to endure a few minutes of Owain trying to passionate defend his honor in regards to the weight he’d failed to lift. “I know that’s the one she had me working with last time we were here, I really do! She put one of them on each side of the bar and dared me to lift it, and I did without even a moment’s hesitation! My arms did feel quite like gelatin afterward, but it really did happen and I bet if I called her right now, she’d prove it to you both!”

“Hold off on calling her over this,” Inigo said, looking at his cousin with shining eyes. “I think I might have something else we need to discuss with her, and it involves one of her most favorite people in the world.”

“Inigo, if you’re takin’ this time to make a mom joke, I can’t believe you,” Brady interrupted, sounding worried as he spoke. “I thought you’d at least have the decency to not talk about _her_ mom like that.”

“What? No, I’m not talking about her mother like that, I’m referring to Severa on this one. It was a taste of sarcasm, as we all know that Severa’s on Kjelle’s last nerve at this point, with her waltzing in and taking over our group of friends.” Inigo slammed a fist down into his open and waiting other hand, excited to get to talk through the idea he’d just come up with, but before he had a chance to start explaining he felt something hit him squarely in the forehead, something that wasn’t hard or painful but definitely had force to it.

He found himself being stared at by the other two, not because of what he’d said but because of what was now stuck to his head. “Why does it look like someone’s shot you with a foam dart?” Owain asked, reaching for the object and pulling it off Inigo’s face. Once he was holding it, he let it roll into his palm so that he could hold it out for all three of them to look at. “Okay, better question, why’d someone just shoot you with a foam dart in the gym?”

“Oh, you know, because it makes perfect sense for someone to have a dart gun with them in here.” His reply came off a lot more scathing than he’d intended for it to have, which didn’t seem to bother Owain as he shrugged it off, but judging by how Brady recoiled at the very same words Inigo must have gone at least bit too far with them. Again, though, his chance at saying anything else was stopped when a second dart hit him, this time in the arm, followed by several others sticking on different parts of his exposed skin.

While he was left plucking darts off of himself, and Brady looked to be trying his hardest not to be bothered by what he’d heard be said, Owain was the one looking to see the source of the gunfire, and when he saw a dark-haired head peeking around a machine on the other side of the gym, he tilted his head in surprise. “Huh, why’s that look like…oh! Guys, I think I know who’s shooting at Inigo, and I think she might shoot again.”

“Are you going to be a dear and share your knowledge, or what, Owain?” Tossing a dart at his cousin, to get him to point in the direction he was looking, Inigo turned to see the same dark head of hair, followed by a brightly-colored gun coming out from the side of the machine that sent a barrage of sticky darts straight at him. He ducked, having seen them coming, which meant that it was the other two guys with him that were left getting hit. “My apologies, friends, I just wasn’t going to—“

“How dare you duck out of the way of those shots?” the person with the gun loudly called out from her side of the gym. “I was aiming for you and only you, Inigo, why did you go and make me shoot tolerable people?” As he sat there staring at her, trying to make sense of what she was getting at, she came out from behind the machine and skipped to join the three guys. “I thought I was going to get great target practice on a live target, and then you blew it.”

“Next time you want a live target, Noire, perhaps you should warn them.” Throwing one of the darts he’d pulled off of himself at her, he watched her eyes narrow for a second before her expression went entirely peaceful. “However, it is nice to see you here. How you managed to get in, I don’t know, but you’re here and that’s what matters.”

“She got in here with me,” Brady muttered in response, hanging his head as he did. “Which I was tryin’ to tell Owain before he dragged me into the gym with him. I told Noire I’d help find somewhere good for her to practice with that gun and I guess she, uh, decided that you’d make a good target despite you not bein’ the reason I’m in here!”

“Huh? For once, it isn’t Inigo who caused you to do something and break a promise with me?” Noire seemed genuinely surprised to hear the answer, which had left Inigo with his jaw dropped and sending daggers with his eyes at his cousin, who was whistling innocently. “I don’t know if I can believe that, Brady. It’s never how it happens.”

Rather than try explaining to her that it was, in fact, how it happened, Inigo had the courtesy to not continue throwing his cousin under the bus, but rather let his mind go back to the idea he’d been ready to present before he’d been shot in the first place. “Say, Noire, I know you currently hate me for stealing your boyfriend away from you—“ he was interrupted by Noire loudly telling him that Brady wasn’t her boyfriend, and Brady was quietly reminding him that she wasn’t his girlfriend at the same time, “—oh, whatever you two are, that’s not the point here! I wanted to ask, Noire, would you be interested in attending a party of sorts sometime soon?”

“Since when were we talking about a party?” Owain asked Brady in a whisper, his friend shaking his head in response. “Okay, cool, just making sure I didn’t miss any part of the conversation before I,” he raised his voice, “ask what the hell we’re doing inviting someone to a party none of us know about!”

“I told you, we have something we need to discuss with Kjelle that involves her favorite person, and this is it!” Inigo snapped as a reply, before giving his full attention back to Noire, who was eyeing him with apparent suspicion. “Ahem, I mean, I have this lovely idea for a party to get our new group of friends to get to know one another a bit better, and you being interested in going would help me decide if we should go through with it or not.”

Giving it less than a second’s worth of thought, Noire replied, “I’ll only go if it’s a pool party, and it’s not held here. Maybe we could do it at Brady’s house, his mom’s got such a lovely backyard for this kind of thing…” She gave a soft sigh, looking towards Brady as she hoped he’d go along with her suggestion.

“H-hey now, Ma said we can’t use the pool again until it’s fixed, and she’s not willin’ to get it fixed when we can just come here.” Now it was Brady’s turn to look at someone, and he chose the blond sitting right next to him as his target. “Besides, there’s a decent pool in Owain’s yard, maybe that’ll work out for this.”

“Maybe it would, or maybe it wouldn’t, we’d have to ask my parents for permission before we started planning anything involving it.” Owain tapped a finger against his jaw as he thought about if there were any other obstacles in the way between what they were currently talking about and making it a reality, but when he thought of nothing he excused himself to go call the other person they’d mentioned as being necessary for having this very conversation, as he didn’t want her to be left out.

That left Inigo sitting next to Brady, who was now looking at him since his initial target had just ran off, and Noire was still standing right nearby with her dart gun in hand. There was something he wanted to say about what his innocent suggestion had been turned into without his consent, but the time to have done that had long since passed, now that Owain was getting Kjelle involved. And, as he glanced at Noire and how she was still holding her finger on her gun’s trigger, he knew that bringing it up now wasn’t going to end well for himself. “Let’s hope he doesn’t get the permission and we’re stuck having to have this party somewhere else, hm?” he said to himself under his breath, thoughts of what he’d wanted to happen with this crossing his mind. “Last thing I need is for—“

“You’re mumbling and I don’t like it!” Noire screeched, raising her gun and shooting another dart into Inigo’s face. “We are _right_ here and so you need to speak to us, not to yourself like a loser! Now talk, damn it!”

“I wasn’t saying anything of importance!” he told her, taking the dart off his face and throwing it on the floor. “It was merely a musing I had that wasn’t going to do me any good if I never vocalized it for myself. End of story.”

Brady raised an eyebrow at him, unsure of whether or not he should buy the explanation. “I don’t know, ya seemed to be sayin’ something pretty important. Noire’s onto somethin’ on this one, so tell us what you’re really thinkin’, please.”

“It’s nothing, I promise.” In a battle of who would be more insistent, he was painfully going to lose against the two, but Inigo wasn’t going to spill his thoughts without a decent reason to be doing so. “Maybe when Owain comes back I’ll tell you, but never before that and possibly not even then.”

That was taken as a challenge rather than an attempt to get them to back off, and so the very moment Owain came back inside, Kjelle right on his heels because she quite literally ran to the rec center to see what was going on when she heard news of a party, the two people who’d been sitting with Inigo tried convincing them both to get Inigo to talk. When it came down to it, there wasn’t any way that he was going to remain silent when dealing with either of them, and so he accepted his fate that he was going to have to crush their dreams of a pool party sooner rather than later.

“I don’t want to be the one to tell you all this, but it should be known that certain people that I intend on having come to this party won’t appreciate being expected to swim with all of us,” he started, dancing around who it was he was speaking of because he didn’t want them all to attack him for being courteous to this particular person. “And so, while a pool party would be great if it was just the five of us that were going to be there, it wouldn’t quite work with what I have in mind…”

“You’re talking about Severa, we know.” The way Kjelle spat the name made Inigo regret ever mentioning that she needed to get involved, but no one else seemed to mind the animosity she was speaking with. “And we get it, she’s your sister now so we all have to accommodate to her and what she wants, but ever since she got involved in everything we do she has controlled it all. Why should we let her control this?”

Inigo didn’t have a response, because truthfully he wasn’t sure what Severa’s whole issue with the idea of swimming was, but he couldn’t admit to that. Not when everyone was tagging along with Kjelle’s point and insisting that they do what they want, not what she would want. “I never thought you’d start catering to her, of all people,” Owain said, punching Inigo in the shoulder. “I thought you’d always stay true to your actual friends and family, not her.”

“Funny how it’s the two of you getting hardest on me over this, when you’re friends with her too!” Inigo hadn’t meant to raise his voice, but when he had and everyone fell silent to look at him, he knew his face was turning bright red with the attention. “I’m only saying, maybe we can save the pool party idea for something else and let this be exactly what I intended for it to be.”

“Maybe we could.” Kjelle shrugged, looking to Owain to watch him nod in agreement with her. “Or maybe we could do what we want and let her deal with it. It’s ultimately up to all of us, and I’m firmly against us catering to her this time.”

“It’s not even guaranteed that we can use the pool if we have this at my house, so we don’t need to worry about that right now, right?” Owain smiled and gave his cousin a thumbs-up. “We’ll go with your idea if I can’t get permission, and the other idea if I can. That way, almost everyone’s happy with the outcome!”

Inigo didn’t want to argue further, not when everyone else was fine with the compromise, but he was regretting the entire idea of the party after all. He hadn’t gotten to tell everyone that he wanted this party to happen to distract the two girls who’d just gotten jobs from their work, maybe cause their performance at work to suffer for a shift, and he knew he wasn’t ever going to be given the chance to say that. His plan had gotten pulled from his hands before he had time to really refine it, and now how it was going to turn out was resting squarely on the shoulders of people that weren’t him. For anyone else, that might have been a relief to know, but he wasn’t sure that they were going to be as nice to Severa as he would have been, simply because of the friend group dividing lines she’d started blurring.

For days, while she was starting her job and spending more time away from the house than she ever had, he was wondering what the outcome of his friends planning this party was going to be. Was Owain going to get that permission or not, and if he did were they really going to go through with making this party focused on the pool there in his backyard? (As Inigo remembered it, it wasn’t even that nice of a pool—it made him wish that if the pool thing was being so heavily touted, they’d pick the house with a decent pool to have the party at.) If he couldn’t get the permission, would they just give up on the overall idea of the party, or would Inigo’s actual plan be the one to see the light of day? There were so many variables, so many things that could happen, and he wasn’t being told a word of it.

That all changed when Severa came home from her last day of training with an invitation in her hand, that she shoved at him the moment she saw him. “One of your nerd friends came by and handed two of these to me, said one was for me and one for you. It’s for some stupid party happening at Owain’s house in a couple weeks, and I guess we’re both invited to it,” she explained, not even giving him time to open the invite for himself. “His parents aren’t going to be there, your friend made sure to tell me that before he went on his way.”

“He…oh gods, did they have Brady take invites to you two?” Watching as Severa nodded, a look of disgust on her face as she did, Inigo gave a long sigh. “Of course they did. Why couldn’t either of the people you actually like be the one to take these to you?”

“I don’t know, but the weird girl with the gun didn’t have her gun with her today, although her new toy looks more dangerous than any sticky darts could be.” Miming shooting a bow and arrow with her hands, Severa stopped the act when she heard Inigo sigh once more. “Hey, I’m not making fun of her, I’m speaking the truth about her. She’s weirder than weird. The weirdest. Strange. Needs to get some real help.”

“I can’t deny that,” Inigo replied, sounding down on himself yet still cracking a smile up at Severa. “But, how odd is this, I had no idea they were having a party, so for both of us to be invited…well, maybe it means you’re finally being accepted by our group!”

Shrugging, Severa replied, “I doubt it, the guy didn’t seem happy to give me my invite or yours. He did have one to give to Cynthia though, and it was all decorated in little hearts that had her squealing until she got told to shut up by the boss.” That led for Inigo to actually look at his invitation, seeing that it was penned by both Owain and Kjelle, as was made obvious by the countless ramblings combined with to-the-point statements. “Don’t worry, it didn’t say anything mine didn’t, it just looked like someone who has a real crush on her was the one to make it.”

“Huh, I wonder who that could be.” His smile turned genuine as he saw Severa glare at him for the statement. “I’m just saying, it’s not exactly hard to guess who might have decorated her invitation. But that’s not important. You two will be coming to this, right?”

“Oh, definitely. It’s not like it’s going to end up being a bad time, it’s just your nerd friends having a nerd friend convention. We’ll show up and easily be the prettiest people there, and you’ll all have to deal with it.” Laughing, Severa brushed a hand through one of her pigtails. “It’ll prove to your whole little group that we’re good people, and we’re worthy of coming to parties of yours. Just you watch.”

As she walked upstairs to go change out of her work clothes, Inigo found himself scouring the invitation for any mention of the pool on it. When he didn’t see it, his spirits soared; he had somehow managed to get his way in the end, and that meant that this party would be able to serve as the distraction he needed it to be. How he hadn’t heard a single word about this thing going through until then, he had no idea, but he figured it was something to do with how everyone else had taken it upon themselves to do the planning.

He wasn’t aware of how wrong that guess was until it was far too late to do anything.


	4. Chapter 4

“Do you think we’re going to get off work in time to get to be at the party when everyone else gets there?” Cynthia asked Severa, as the two were reorganizing opposite sides of the same rack of clothing. “I don’t want to be late unless we’re going to be fashionably late, but we’re not going to really be fashionable when we get there, so I don’t know how I actually feel about us being late.”

“That’s not what that means, but whatever. We’re going to get there when we get there, and there’s nothing we can do about being late or not.” Sighing, Severa looked over at the other racks they were expected to put back in order before they got to leave, some of which they’d already spent time on but customers had gone through and rearranged them once more. “At this rate we might not be getting there until everyone’s leaving, though.”

It took a second for Cynthia to come out of her work mode to fully accept those words, but when she did she let out a shrill scream. “No, I can’t get there when everyone else is gone, I can’t let it just be you, me, and Owain there at any point! He’ll try and make moves on me and I don’t want you to be the only one around to see if he does. That’d be something you’d never let me live down, not ever.”

“Trust me, the fact that you’re even considering wanting him to make moves on you is something I don’t want you to live down, seeing something happen with my own two eyes will just be icing on the cake.” A pause, Severa’s mind getting fixated on the idea of a cake being present at the party. “Hm, do you think they’re going to provide any kind of food when we get there? It’ll probably all be gone before we arrive, if they do, but do you think there’ll be any to begin with?”

“Carrot sticks and whatever weird foods Owain’s mom bought for him for this, I’m sure! I can’t see either of the people in charge of this actually having gotten anything tasty, it’s probably all healthy or experimental.” Cynthia laughed, before pulling a dress off the rack and holding it up for Severa to see. “Ooh, this’d be cute to get to wear to the party, don’t you think? It’s so stupid that we work here all day and yet we’re still broke, I’d love to buy this and get to impress everyone by wearing it.”

Tapping her finger to her chin as she looked at the pale blue dress Cynthia was holding her up, Severa shook her head in disgust after deciding she didn’t like it. “It’d clash too much with my red hair, but for you…eh, I can see it looking pretty good on you. Too bad we’re just part-time employees working in a clothing store where everything costs at least half our paycheck, I’d love to see you wearing that.”

“Okay, pretend I could wear it. What would you be wearing beside me as we walk into that party being the single most stylish girls anyone there knows?” As she was putting her dress back on the rack, Severa was across from her, scouting out something that would catch her eye; she ended up pulling out a dress of a similar style, one that was a pale lavender instead of the blue Cynthia had chosen.

“I think this’d probably look decent on me, I’m sure my hair would wash its color out too but it’s a nice shade. Reminds me a bit of…” Severa raised a hand towards her eyes, motioning towards one of them. “My dad’s eyes were a darker version of this color. So I guess I’d say I’ve got a sweet spot for it. He’d be proud of me if he saw me wearing this, until he saw the price tag, then he’d go off on me for being careless with my own money and remind me to ask him to help me out with things like this. He’d never buy me a dress this expensive, that’s the joke here.”

“I don’t know how you do it, having a dead dad and making jokes about him as if he’s here. If either of my parents died, I don’t think I’d ever be able to joke about them again, ever.” The air between the girls became solemn then, with Severa re-racking the dress she’d chosen to get back to work and Cynthia trying to come up with something else to say. They had moved on to the next rack by the time she found any words to use, but in typical fashion her mind had skipped around to a different topic entirely. “So, what’re the exact plans for when we get off? We go to your house and get ready, right? Then head to the party?”

Nodding, Severa didn’t take her eyes off of the rack as she replied, “Sounds about right. All our stuff’s up in my bedroom, unless Inigo decided to play a trick on us and take it to the party already, so we should be able to pop in, change, and hightail it across the neighborhood to get to Owain’s in decent time. Hopefully no one will mind that we’re not there early, and if they want to start a fight for us maybe being late I’ll deck ‘em.”

“Don’t start any fights, we don’t need to cause drama when I think everything’s finally gotten settled between all of us.” Cynthia thought for a second, hesitating on saying anything else, before deciding that she was just going to ask her question anyway. “Do you think Gerome’s going to be there? He really capital-does capital-not like anyone that’s going to be there aside from the two of us, do you think he’ll bother coming?”

“I don’t know if he was even invited, honestly. I bet Kjelle and Owain have enough sense between the two of them to know that he wouldn’t show up unless he was forced to, and if they invited him anyway, well, I don’t know what they’re thinking.” Severa pulled another dress off the rack, this one a pure black dress that was many sizes too small for her. “ _Gawds_ , why do we sell things that look like they’d squeeze whoever’s wearing it to death? Can you imagine trying to put this on?”

“If it was my size, maybe,” was Cynthia’s reply, as she managed to take a peek at the tag on the dress. “Why’re you getting upset about clothes like that when we’re in the really small sizes? Now if we were back in what we can wear and you found that and it still looked like it’d be super tight, then you could complain and I’d dare you to try it on for yourself.”

Putting it back on the rack, Severa glanced over at the rack where she’d find that dress in a size more like her own, an idea brewing in her mind. “How about I go find it over there and try it on just for kicks? I bet it’ll fit me horribly, if it’s not squeezing me until I pass out. You think you can cover for me until I get this over with?”

“Uh, duh? It’s not like we’re doing anything except rack organizing, you can so step away for a few minutes to try something on. Who knows, maybe you won’t even find it over there, I don’t remember seeing it.” Going right back to her work, working even faster than normal, Cynthia already started giving the cover Severa had asked for, which meant it was go time to try this out. She strolled over to one of the previous racks they’d organized and scanned it, checking to see if she could find it—and find it she did, nestled between two dresses of similar color but different styles. She whistled to get Cynthia’s attention, showed her what she’d found, and then ran to the back of the store to the changing room, to try it on and ultimately laugh at herself when she was wearing it.  
Except that wasn’t what happened, not even close to it. As she slid into the dress, she found it to be a lot more comfortable than she had been expecting it to be, and while it did feel tight as the fabric constricted her to give her more of the desired “hourglass” shape, it wasn’t unbearable. It was at that moment that she wished she’d had the foresight to bring her phone into the room with her, so that she could take a picture of herself wearing this dress, but she couldn’t risk getting caught by the manager while in the dress to go grab it. “I…can’t believe I’m going to say this,” she mumbled, looking at herself in the mirror, astonished at how well the dress fit her, “but I kind of wish I could take this home with me. Wear this to the party instead of whatever I already planned for. But I can’t, I can’t afford this thing!”

Scrambling for a tag to assure herself that she couldn’t pay for the dress, Severa was shocked to find that there was no tag on the dress at all, aside from the one stating its size. There was no price, no sensor to protect it from theft, nothing—it was like the dress had been put on the rack specifically for her, and what was stopping her from making it her own? The moment she had that thought she was berating herself for it, she wasn’t a thief and she couldn’t steal something from her job like that. But what if she just borrowed it for the night, bringing it back to work the next day and putting it back on the rack like it’d never gone missing in the first place?

It was tempting, it really was, but at the same time, she knew that if she got caught in doing it she’d be fired, at the very least. Maybe the police would be called on her for stealing. Maybe she’d go to jail for a few days for the crime. Maybe her mother would flip her lid and kick her out of the house. The possibilities of what could go wrong were endless, but Severa’s heart was set on wearing this dress to the party and she was going to need some real convincing to not take it with her. After changing back into her work clothes, she left the dress on the “return to rack” ledge outside the stall and skipped back to where Cynthia had already gone through an entire rack on her own. “It fit me like a glove,” she said, sounding awfully excited for having only tried it on because she thought it wouldn’t work. “And I really want it. Like, have to have it, want it.”

“So much for it squeezing you to death, huh?” Cynthia giggled. “I wish you could’ve shown me how you looked in it, I bet it was fantastic. Ooh, idea! How about we finish up, get clocked out, and you can try it on for me again? I did this all super fast so maybe we’ll have enough time to do that before we have to get to your house!”

Severa looked at the racks and shrugged. “It’s worth a shot, I guess. I’d be cool with trying the dress on again for you, so you can tell me how drop-dead gorgeous I am in it.” She got right back to work, picking up pace to keep up with the breakneck speed Cynthia was working at now, and soon enough they’d finished their given task and went to ask the manager if they were free to go. They were, as they’d predicted, but before they left they headed to the dressing room to get another shot at that dress.

It was still sitting on the shelf, exactly where Severa had left it, its tags missing and looking like it wasn’t going to be touched anytime soon. She grabbed it and the two of them went into one of the changing stalls, where she slipped it on once more, it feeling just as it had before. “See, look at how great I am in this,” she said, twirling around to let Cynthia get a full look at how the dress fit her. “It’s like it was made for me, and it compliments my hair and skin so well. Too bad I can’t afford it, I’d be the hottest girl at the party tonight if I could, and everyone would never forget how well I clean up.”

“If I had any money right now I’d totally help you pay for it,” Cynthia said, grinning at her friend. “You really do wear that dress well, it’s a shame you won’t be able to rock it tonight.”

“But what I do anyway?” Severa couldn’t believe she’d actually asked the question, and now that the words had left her lips she wasn’t able to take it back. “There’s no tags on the dress, we could walk out with it right now and no one would know any better. I wear it tonight, we bring it back tomorrow and act like nothing happened, and then I got to wear the dress without having to commit to owning it.”

“So, uh, stealing?”

“Borrowing’s more like it, if you think about it. I’m not keeping it, I’m just using it for one night. You know, like a library book? Except instead of a book it’s a dress, and instead of this being a library it’s our job I’m borrowing from. It’s not like anyone’ll notice that one dress is missing for one night.” Already Severa was pulling her work clothes back on, with the dress underneath them. She struggled a bit when it came to making it not obvious that she was hiding something under her shirt, seeing as she couldn’t tuck a dress into her pants, but she made it work well enough to be confident in what she was doing. “Come on, we’re going to do this. Everything’ll go right, I promise.”

“And if it doesn’t, we both lose our jobs! Do you want to risk that, really? We just started here not that long ago!” Jumping to block the door so Severa couldn’t get out, Cynthia looked straight into her eyes with worry. “I can’t let you do this, I really can’t. You look great but I can’t let you borr— _steal_ the dress!”

“It’s not stealing, now shush, we’re doing this.” Severa physically grabbed Cynthia’s lips and pushed them closed, her friend giving her a pleading look before yanking herself away and muttering that she wasn’t proud of what they were doing. “Look, I’m not proud either, but we have to do this in order to impress everyone. Let’s head back to my house, we’ve still got to get you ready before we go to the party.”

The whole walk home was silent, as Cynthia didn’t know what else to say to her friend and Severa was too busy trying to keep herself calm about what she’d done to strike up small talk. Even when they were finishing getting ready back at the house, they stayed relatively quiet, not paying any attention to what the other was doing until they were done. If Severa had worn what she was originally planning on, the two of them would have been matching, but now that she was wearing the slinky black dress, she was leagues beyond Cynthia in regards to how good they looked. Even the nicest sundress Cynthia had wouldn’t compare to the expensive dress that they’d taken from the store, and both of them knew it.

No one was home when they left, Cordelia off doing her own thing and Chrom and Lucina out doing something together, which meant that there wasn’t anyone around to question where Severa had gotten the money to get the dress. In fact, there wasn’t anyone who was going to ask about it until they got to the party, and even then it wasn’t a guarantee that someone would pay enough attention to exactly what Severa was wearing to know to question it. The fear that, if anyone was going to ask, it was going to be Inigo weighed heavily on her mind for the entire trip over to the party location, but she ultimately pushed it away as they approached.

That was because, naturally, she could hear the sound of splashing water, of teenagers laughing and sounding like they were having the time of their lives in a swimming pool, and she could feel herself thinking back to things she’d rather not dwell on. Cracking jokes about her dead father was one thing, but thinking about _that_ was another one entirely, and she didn’t want to spend the night focused on that. “I didn’t know Owain’s family had a pool at their house,” Cynthia said, leaning close to Severa as she spoke. “If I had known, I so would’ve brought my swimsuit.”

“We’re not going to a pool party,” she replied, hoping like hell she wasn’t lying to herself and her friend. “We would have been told if it was one before this, and if it was one I wouldn’t have decided to show up. I don’t do pool parties.”

Lo and behold, when they were let in the back gate to the yard, there were familiar faces enjoying their time in the water, but before Severa could tell who it was she had Inigo jumping in front of her, trying to shield her eyes. “I don’t know what it is about you and pools, but I have to tell you that coming in here right now is a bad idea. Go home, don’t look back, this is all a trap,” he hurriedly told her, letting Cynthia past him but not letting Severa move an inch closer to the yard. “I should have warned you when I found out, but I found out far too late to do anything.”

“Which one of them…” Severa’s voice trailed off as she tried looking past Inigo and he whacked her back with his shoulder. “Hey, watch it! I want to see who’s to blame for this! Which one of them took something about me none of you understand and tried making it into some kind of joke?” She was mad, angry, upset at the world that she’d done something so reckless and illegal all for nothing, and to be being manipulated when she got to where she was going. “Inigo, damn it, tell me!”

“I don’t know who did it, but I don’t want you to have to see it. We can get in through the front door, we can sit in the house and chill in Owain’s room until people are done swimming, I’ll do that for you.” Inigo sounded so genuine as he was speaking that it was hard for her to do anything but trust him, and so she allowed him to lead her around to the front of the house and in the door, him shielding her eyes from looking out the back door to where everyone else was gathered until they were in the front bedroom that was their destination. “Here, look, I wish I could say I have my guess as to which one of them it was, but with it being all of them here, I can’t honestly guess.”

Severa was on the verge of tears, not from her anger but from the thoughts that she’d been trying to ignore coming back with a vengeance. “None of them understand why I don’t do pools, why I don’t go swimming and don’t like water and definitely don’t want to be at a party where there’s no adults and a pool in the backyard!” she screamed, bringing her hands to cover her face so he couldn’t see the emotions she was expressing. “This isn’t me being some kind of bitch, this is me having a real issue they’re playing with!”

“I understand that, which is why I stepped in the moment I could.” He fell silent when he heard her sniffling, and as she started choking out garbled words he couldn’t bring himself to do anything but pat her leg until she seemed to calm down. “Listen, I know we aren’t on the best of terms and really never have been, but if you want to tell me what eats at you whenever water gets brought up, I’ll listen.”

She took a while to find her voice, as every time she started saying something her chest would start filling back up with emotion and she would have to cry it out. But when the words were available to her, she looked at Inigo with her now-reddened and puffy eyes and gave a small nod. “We were little, and it was at some relative’s house. Daddy always said I had to play nice, that I had to behave, and that I had to stay away from the pool. He always said it to _me_ , not to…not to Morgan.”  
“Who’s Morgan?” Inigo asked, having never heard Severa mention someone by that name. “I assume you’re about to tell me, but still.”

“We were just playing hide and seek, and I was seeking while she was hiding. She had gotten me in trouble several times that day, because she’d get mad that I would hide where she couldn’t find me and tell our parents, and they’d snap at me and tell me to play nicer.” Severa coughed, her whole body shaking as she did. “So I told her that she could hide wherever she wanted, anywhere at all. I didn’t care where it was, and I wanted to never have to find her.”

“Did you say ‘our’ parents? As in…you had a sister?” This was news to Inigo, and hearing it be told as Severa was crying and so emotionally fragile made him doubly regret not warning her about the bait-and-switch nature of the party until it was too late. “Severa, I didn’t know. None of us knew. If they had, this wouldn’t have happened, and no one would have ever had the chance to hurt you like this. We didn’t know that you had a sister who drow—“

“She didn’t drown!” Her voice carried further than she thought it would, and louder, and Severa covered her mouth as she went wide-eyed when Inigo looked back at her, surprised at what she’d just yelled. “It was wintertime. She thought she’d be cute and hide in the pool and I’d find her there, but I didn’t and she, I don’t know, she got too cold and no one knew where she was and by the time we did she was gone.”

No words were spoken for several minutes after the revelation had been made, Severa crying again and Inigo too stunned at what he’d just heard to even know where to start. The whole time, he’d figured that Severa’s aversion to swimming was something relating to being unable to swim, or maybe a near-death experience she’d once suffered. He hadn’t known that every time he’d told her to go to the pool to leave him alone, or every time swimming was brought up, she was reliving the memory of her sister dying because of her lack of finding her in an innocent game of hide and seek. Their silence wasn’t something that was known by everyone else, so when Cynthia came into the house, dripping wet from having gone into the pool in her dress, she wasn’t aware she should have been respectful, even though it took going to Owain’s room to find either of the people she was looking for. “Oh my _gods_ coming here was the best idea ever!” she chirped, clasping her hands together loudly. “You need to come outside, both of you!”

“No, you need to leave us alone for a moment,” Inigo snapped back, sounding angrier than intended but getting his point across as Cynthia slinked back outside, mumbling apologies under her breath as she did. “Severa, if you want to go home, I won’t blame you for it. In fact, I’ll follow you back if you want me to. It’s not fair to you to be somewhere that was set up specifically for you to suffer.”

“Some friends of mine they are, huh?” she asked, not naming names but making it clear she was referring to the two in charge of the party. “They can’t get past me having other friends long enough to respect that I don’t do anything with pools. What kind of friends do that?”

“Ones that have some sort of grudge to settle, I suppose.” Not wanting to mention that the entire idea for a party was his, although the setting wasn’t his to decide on, Inigo pulled Severa into a big hug that he knew wasn’t anything she wanted, judging by how she groaned the moment he was wrapped around her. “You don’t need to worry, you know that you have true friends even if it’s not them. Like…me. I’m your friend, aren’t I?”

“You don’t count, you’re basically my brother anyway.” Now Severa’s insistence on using a fake siblinghood as a coping method made more sense to Inigo, but he wasn’t going to draw attention to the fact that he’d figured that out. She wasn’t using it to cope with losing her father as much as she was using it to deal with having a dead sibling. “Let go of me and let me, I don’t know, go fix my makeup or something so I can look at least half-decent when we’re outside with everyone else.”

Inigo obliged on letting go of her, and was standing up, about to let her go do as she wished, when what she’d just said clicked in his head. “When we’re—Severa! You just bared your heart to me and yet you still want to suffer through being here? What kind of decision is that, crying then facing the very thing you’re crying over?”

“Morgan’s been dead for, like, ten years now, I guess I’ve got to move past it somehow.” With a shrug, Severa stood up and headed out of the room, nearly slipping on a wet wooden floor thanks to when Cynthia had dripped water throughout the house. Inigo followed her out, but went to wait by the back door to the house for her in case she changed her mind about wanting to actually go outside. But when she was finished touching up her makeup and came to the door, she pushed past him without a word, acting as if they hadn’t just had a bonding moment where she spilled one of her deepest secrets.

The moment she went out to the backyard, everyone who was out there stopped what they were doing to look at her. Everyone was in the water to some capacity, some sitting on the edge of the pool while others were inside swimming, and it took all of her strength to not glare directly at Cynthia, who was splashing around having the time of her life. “It’s about time you decide to join us,” Kjelle said with a smile in Severa’s direction. “We were hoping nothing bad had happened.”

 _Oh I’m sure you weren’t_ , she thought to herself, while saying, “No, I just don’t have a very good time around swimming pools. Thought this was a mature get-together, not a time for immature people to chill in the water.”

“Immature? Us?” Cue her looking towards Cynthia for herself, sighing when she saw that Severa’s point was made right there, on her own best friend. To try and make a good comeback, Kjelle waved towards Owain, flicking her hand upwards so that he got up off the edge of the pool, and as she made her hand move sideways, he reluctantly headed towards where Severa was standing. “That’s a rather rude way to refer to people you’re friends with, isn’t it?”

“Lying about a party’s a rather rude thing to do to someone you’ve known since you were little,” Severa replied, not noticing that Owain was stepping closer to her, as she was focused entirely on stomping Kjelle down with her words. “Why couldn’t you have at least put on the invitation that this was a thing, hm? Why couldn’t you?”

“Inigo could have warned you, he knew this was what we were planning.” Kjelle’s answer was not what Severa had expected, and while Inigo had known that he’d most likely get thrown under the bus like that, he didn’t expect it to happen so quickly. Rage in her eyes, Severa turned to face him, and he scrambled to try explaining to her what had actually gone down to make everything  happen as it had, but before he got the chance, they both heard Kjelle call out, “Oh, by the way, hope you had the sense to take your phone off your person before you came out here.”

All he could do was lunge forward and try to stop Owain from grabbing Severa and, using the upper body strength he’d worked so hard for, throwing her into the pool, kicking and screaming the whole way until her body was submerged. “You _moron_ , why did you just do that?” he asked as he stumbled, unable to have done anything without falling flat on his face. “You don’t know what her problem here is, you don’t! She didn’t deserve that!”’

“I’m just doing what we all agreed on,” Owain said, shaking his arms out after having dragged her like he had. “You knew we wanted to toss her in, ‘cause we knew she wasn’t going to get in by herself. You should’ve said something earlier if you didn’t want us doing this right away.”

Inigo brought a hand to his face, pinching the bridge of his nose as he tried to remain calm over things. “I’d only been telling you she wouldn’t appreciate this since you first brought it up, but it’s nice to know that I’ve been ignored simply because I was talking about defending Severa from you guys!”

“She could always use to loosen up, getting thrown into the water’ll do that for her.” Kjelle smirked, before looking to where Severa had been thrown in, her whole body still under the water. “She…does know how to swim, doesn’t she? Been under for a while now.”

Without hesitation, Inigo ran past his cousin and jumped into the pool, not answering Kjelle because he knew the answer for himself. They’d just drowned her, hadn’t they? She was dead or dying and this was their fault for wanting to include her in their water fun! He lifted her out of the water and got her onto the side of the pool, the rise and fall of her chest making it clear she was still breathing, but it was impossible to see her face as her hair was covering it. “Severa, please, tell us all you’re okay before we have murder charges on our hands,” he begged, pulling hair off her face to expose it. What he found was her eyes tightly closed and her hand blocking her nose from any water getting into it—she’d braced herself for the water before she’d hit it.

But based on how tremors were wracking her body as she laid there, it was clear that the experience had traumatized her in at least one way, and people were going to have to pay for that at some point. And it _might_ not have to be her making them pay, he decided, as he pulled himself up on the ledge and got her head up onto his legs. “I’m so sorry they did this to you, after what you’d just told me about yourself. This won’t be the end of this, I promise.”

Her response was to open her eyes and glare at him, the first person she saw, because she knew he was partly to blame for what had just happened: she’d just faced her fear of swimming pools head-on and ruined a stolen dress she couldn’t ever return in the process.


	5. Chapter 5

The lunch table was oddly empty, given that normally nine people sat there and there were currently four of them present. “Have any of you seen any of the others?” Kjelle asked, propping her chin up on her hands as she patiently waited for someone to reply. As expected, no one said a word, two of the three enthralled with each other and the third too busy reading a book to notice he was being spoken to. “Okay, taking that as a no. How have we not seen any of them, we all go to the same school! This is stupid. This whole thing is dumb. Why can’t we find them?”

“Perhaps it could be attributed to your past behavior in regards to them?” the person reading his book said, not looking up from the page he was on. “We were all present at the gathering where you effectively scarred someone for life with your plotting, it is quite possible that—“

“You know what, Laurent? I don’t want your answer after all.” She gave him a dirty look, aware he wasn’t going to see it, and after he’d sighed and returned to tuning her out she was glancing over at the others, their eyes locked together as one sat basically on the other’s lap. “I’d love for either of you to get your minds somewhere that isn’t on each other and answer my question, since Laurent can’t be trusted to do so.”

She waited a few seconds before kicking underneath the table, her foot causing a loud thudding noise that shocked the two of them into frantically looking for the source. “Oh! Er, were you saying something, Kjelle?” Owain awkwardly asked, scratching at the back of his head while Cynthia giggled as if she hadn’t been ignoring her as well. “Was it about how lonely the table looks right now?”

“It was, but I don’t expect you to have an actual answer for why it is. Unless you do, then by all means, you should share it.” Glaring at Owain as she waited for his response, Kjelle saw him shrug and turn his attention back towards Cynthia, which only frustrated her. “Come on, really? While I’m watching you, even?”

“Ooh, I can answer things for you, don’t worry!” At the sound of Cynthia’s chipper voice, Kjelle rolled her eyes, but something was better than nothing and she wasn’t going to complain about who it was telling her news. “I’m pretty sure no one else is going to be joining us now, I don’t even think any of them are at school today. Have you seen any of them? I don’t think so.”

“I don’t normally see most of them in my day, thanks though. And the one that I do normally see, I have no idea where he is right now.” Kjelle moved one of her arms from underneath her, raising it up with her hand gesturing to some height that she couldn’t accurately portray while seated. “Last I heard, he said something about having to practice for a concert or something, but he said he wouldn’t be doing that all day, yet here we are. Just four of us at a table, like a bunch of losers.”

“We’re not losers,” Cynthia retorted, not giving up on the conversation even though Kjelle would have loved for her to have. “Besides, since when you do actually care about any of them? You don’t, do you?”

Dropping her arm, Kjelle tucked it back under her so that her head was properly propped up, smirking at Cynthia as she answered, “Since when do you not care about your so-called best friend, seeing as she’s one of the people I’m concerned about, for once in my life.”

Cynthia leaned back, tilting her head in confusion as she tried processing the accusation that had just been flung her way. “Well, uh, I do care about Severa, I guess? She is my best friend after all, but I haven’t talked to her since that party, and I haven’t seen her since then, and I haven’t been messaged by her since then, and—“

“Okay we get it, you’ve forgotten she exists. Don’t need to keep rambling about it.” The smirk faded as Kjelle realized how annoyed she was with having to deal with Cynthia, of all people, on this matter, but she looked towards Owain to hope he’d jump in and saw him staring hopelessly back at Cynthia, ignoring what was going on around him. “I guess we’ll just play this one by ear, hopefully no one else has died or anything.”

“Must you always be so insensitive when things seem to be going a way you don’t like?” Laurent asked, looking amused over the rim of his glasses as Kjelle shot a glare at him. “It’s not a trait fitting of a girl like you, do you think your mother would enjoy you being so negative all the time?”

“My mother would have punched at least one person by now, so maybe involving her isn’t the best idea you could’ve come up with.” Standing up, Kjelle walked around to behind Laurent, placing a hand on the back of his neck and gripping it tightly enough to make him squirm underneath her palm. “I don’t exactly like when people talk about her, you should know this by now, you little prick.”

Although he was visibly uncomfortable with how she was holding him, his voice was unwavering when he spoke. “Hm, how funny is it that we lose one insufferable person but have another turn into one in her absence? You’ve lost your edge, the spark of your personality that’s made you who you are, Kjelle. Was it having her thrown into the pool? Did you making her face a fear you were unaware of make you think you’re unstoppable, a force that nothing will reckon with?”

That got her to pull her hand back, shaking it off as she tried to get the feeling of the prickly hairs off the back of his neck to leave her fingers. “Having her thrown in made me realize that I’d been treating her badly, and I guess I should apologize for that when I get the chance, but I don’t think I’ve started acting like her since she’s disappeared.” She shrugged, heading back to her seat. “I’ve just started acting more like someone who has things to say and actions to take. Someone who’s not been able to get her way because of that diva being around all the time.”

“That diva that used to be your best friend, might I remind you.” Laurent saw that Kjelle stopped walking and turned back to look at him, her jaw hanging slightly at him having had the nerve to say such a thing to her. “I know you and her used to be close before you changed as people and found your own ways, but old rivalry and tepid friendship does not mean you have to become her to replace her. Just go back to being yourself, stop fretting over her and what she does, and put an end to this stupidity.”

“Someone mention stupidity?” Their conversation came to a halt as Brady came to the table, several foam darts decorating the side of his face as he sat down, only to pluck one of them off and wave it at everyone present. “I’ll tell ya what’s stupid, that’s that you guys let Noire follow me to the practice room with her dart gun. How am I gonna tell Ma that I dropped the violin and shattered it because someone was using me as a target? She’s gonna wring my neck and I’ll have to come up with money for a new one on my own!”

Another dart came flying at him, striking the very hand that was holding the one he’d removed from his face. While he groaned about it, Noire walked up behind him, using her dart gun to bop him on the back of the head before cackling. “I didn’t mean to make you drop it, you’re the klutz who did that,” she said, leaning in closer to him to the point that she was basically pressed up against him. “All I wanted was to get away from the drama for a bit, spend some quality time with a great friend of mine.”

“And to shoot him in the face, apparently,” he grumbled, trying to shake her off but only managing to make her hit him with the gun again. “Hey! Stop that! What’s the matter with ya, thinking that I enjoy you beating up on me like this? No one likes being treated badly by someone they call a friend!”

“How oddly poignant of a statement to have been said just now.” Laurent’s remark was said in Kjelle’s direction, and while she was trying her best to ignore him she knew that he was right about its relevance. Still, though, she’d had every reason to treat Severa like she had about everything leading up to that pool party, she wasn’t going to be made to feel guilty about things when she was just playing the same game everyone else had been.

At any rate, there were now six people there at the table and that meant that things didn’t feel as empty as they had before, even if two of the people there were lost in each other, two were spatting with each other, and the other two had just joined and were bringing their own flavor of insanity. Things weren’t quite like they used to be, but at least it wasn’t a table sitting half-unused like it had been previously.

Before long, it was almost as if that was how their table had always been, everyone slowly letting go of what they’d been focused on and bringing something to a conversation that got struck up. Without someone loud and bossy to control things, they were all able to say what they wanted and do as they pleased, but the fact that there were still missing people was all too noticeable with the lulls in conversation that would normally have been filled with some bragging or some kind of failed romantic conquest mention. How were they going to move past having lost two friends over one of the stupidest things anyone had ever done?

“Oh, looks like you’re all having a wonderful time without me, eh?” Hearing Inigo’s voice came as a surprise to everyone, and they all looked to see him standing a few feet away from the table, Severa at his side but looking elsewhere. “I take some time to help a dear friend out and you already start replacing me, I see how it is.” Giving a fake scoff, he glanced towards Severa, seeing that she wasn’t looking anywhere near the table. “You going to join me and the rest of them, or will you be spending the period with others?”

“Others, I promised them that I’d come help them with the homework once I knew what we were supposed to do.” Severa’s voice was a lot softer than normal, or maybe it was the distance from which she was speaking, but everyone at the table was given the impression that she wanted nothing to do with them—something that was quite obvious, given that she hadn’t sat there once since that failed party. “Besides, I bet Gerome’s getting his ear talked off by now and you know how much he hates that.”

“Right, right, well have fun with your other friends, you’ll be missed around here but I certainly understand why you’re choosing not to stay here.” Patting her on the arm, a friendly gesture that he meant nothing by, Inigo waited until Severa had walked off before he approached the table, a bounce in his step. “Sorry about that, she had quite a few questions that were related back to assignments she’d missed when she was…dealing with certain things we all know about. No need to ask questions.”

Despite him saying that, there was no way people weren’t going to ask something. “That’s the first time I saw her since she, uh, got thrown into the pool,” Kjelle admitted, seeing that Inigo flinched at mention of the event. “She’s really been avoiding all of us, hasn’t she?”

“Well, to be honest, you took something I’d intended to patch things up and made it do nothing but harm her further about past events. I’ve had to watch her struggle through coping with that, coping with losing her job because she couldn’t bring herself to go…” He shook his head as he looked towards Cynthia, who was now hanging her head at hearing the reason why her friend hadn’t been around work. Clearing his throat, he continued, looking back at Kjelle with seriousness in his gaze, “Did you know she’s been putting herself through counseling over this? Her and her mother both, to deal with everything that’s happened to them and to get over what damage this all has done.”

“Sounds like you’re trying to pin everything on me, which isn’t fair. I wasn’t even the one who threw her in, that was Owain’s doing.” It wasn’t an attempt to take blame off her shoulders and put it somewhere else, but rather a statement of a fact that Kjelle wanted to make clear, but Inigo was seeing right through her ruse, once again shaking his head. She rolled her eyes and waited for him to say more before she tried clearing her name further, but when he met her with silence, she was forced to do the same.

Instead of it being either of them to speak next, Laurent was the one who raised his voice enough to be heard. “I would say that you were the one who convinced him it was right and proper to throw her in, to disregard whatever caused her to have a phobia of swimming and just get on with your petty attempt for revenge. What even was your reason, Kjelle? Why did you feel the need to bother her so?”

“Can you hide your obsession with her for five seconds when talking to me about this?” she snapped back, before bringing her hands together in front of her face and taking in a deep breath. “I’ll admit, I did some pretty screwed up stuff towards Severa, but I didn’t do it to ruin whatever friendship me and her still had. I did it because she was a bitch to all of us and she needed to be knocked down a few pegs.”

“Could have done it in a way that didn’t wreck her like you did.” Laurent shrugged, sounding flippant in his words as he went back to reading the book he’d had with him. After giving him several rude gestures in quick succession, Kjelle’s hands were back in front of her face and she was doing more deep breathing to keep herself from adding anything else.

Inigo, watching this happen and not knowing what to do, considered just leaving the conversation where it was and going to find Severa, but he figured that by doing that, he’d upset these people more than they already had been over everything. “I’ll agree that she was harsh and hard to interact with when she first started sitting with us, but she didn’t deserve to be treated that way by someone she respected. But you know what? She’s fine now. Not the same girl she was when this all started, but really, she’s never been the same since her dad died. And now she’s got a healthy way to work through that thanks to all this, so maybe you wanting to put her in her place was a good thing. Maybe.”

He lingered for a second on that last word, before swallowing down hard, seeing that Kjelle had dropped her hands and had tilted her head towards him, looking rather surprised by what he’d just said. She was going to make this difficult, he knew she was going to, but how was he going to react whenever she said what came to her mind? What followed came as a pleasant surprise to him (and to anyone else listening), but it was still something that reacting to would be hard. “I doubt she’ll want to ever hear this from me, since I bet I’m the ‘big bad’ in her mind over all this, but let her know that I’m sorry and I’d like to try again with her if she wants it.”

“I…I’ll pass that message along when I get the chance,” he spat out, trying not to stumble too much over his words, and before he realized what he was doing he was excusing himself from the table to get away from what was happening. A genuine apology hadn’t been something he’d expected, especially not since it hadn’t seemed like anyone felt like they’d done any wrong, but for one of the people behind everything to actually come out an apologize, it was akin to a miracle. Sure, it wasn’t a whole group apology like needed to happen, but it was a start, and it would mean something to Severa whenever she caught wind of it happening.

That brought up the issue of how to approach telling her about it; she wasn’t too bothered by talking about the exact events of that day at the party, but there was a pain in her eyes that couldn’t be shaken whenever she was forced to hear of everyone betraying her for their own fun. The only people she’d trusted prior to that that she could trust after were himself and Gerome, one because he’d tried saving her from what was coming without knowing what it was, and the other because he hadn’t bothered showing up and therefore had no idea anything was going to happen. He wasn’t going to betray that lasting trust to tell her one of the people who had hurt her deepest was trying to say she was sorry, not until he knew that she wasn’t going to take things the wrong way. When that would be, he wasn’t sure, and he wasn’t going to rush things to get them out of the way.

If that meant he had a fractured friend group to deal with, so that he could be there for Severa when she needed him, so be it. The group had made such great strides to become one cohesive unit but now that things were how they were, there was no way that they could all be together until people healed properly. Someone’s mental health was worth more than a solid friend group, no matter what anyone thought. So maybe the others could have their basically-dating pair, and their friendly-fire pair, and the brains and the brawns, all within one group, but Inigo wasn’t going to stick with them if Severa needed him elsewhere, that’s just how his feelings towards her were.

They weren’t actual siblings, but damn it he was going to take care of her and be there for her exactly like he’d do for Lucina if she asked for it, and that was a big commitment to make. It was also exactly what Severa had jokingly used as a coping method for their living situation, except now instead of it being a joke it was their reality. She was basically his sister now, which was something she’d never explicitly wanted but had ended up with through a matter of circumstance.

While he’d been thinking, he’d somehow walked himself over towards the table where Severa and her new friends (and Gerome) were sitting, their books laying open in front of them as she helped them out with their homework. Seeing her be part of a functional unit where there wasn’t some power balance that needed to be kept was almost enough to bring a smile to his face, but he didn’t want to raise suspicion of anyone who might have been watching what he was doing and get asked what was making him smile. If he was going to be happy for her, he was going to do it where she’d be able to see it.

And that was how he came up behind her and, like a brother would to his sister, dug both of his elbows into her shoulders until she screeched. “I thought I’d come join you, since you weren’t exactly confident in this assignment earlier,” he said, once she’d stopped sounding like she was being murdered and her friends had all gotten over being confused that someone else had come to be with them. “The others are all rather boring right now, the usual bickering and whatnot. Homework help would be much more tolerable than that.”

She rolled her shoulders to try and ease the feeling of his elbows in them, but didn’t seem too bothered by what he’d done. “Well, we could always use more help over here. I’m only one person, I can’t help three others with their work when everyone’s got a different thing they’re hung up on. Take a seat and get to work, will you?” It was more of a demand than anything, but it was a friendly one that he wasn’t going to ignore coming from her. This was what she wanted to do with her time now, and he was going to support her in what she was doing even if he didn’t understand the exact motives for why. Her being happy was what mattered above all, and to see her genuinely smile when she felt comfortable with her situation…that was the only payment he needed for any of this.

Healing was going to be a long process, and there was a lot that she needed to heal from, but he wasn’t going to be an obstacle to it. For as long as it was going to take, he was going to support her and help her when things got hard. Wasn’t how he’d always approached her, but it certainly was how he was from here on out, and he knew _someday_ she’d do the same in return for him.

* * *

The bouquet of flowers in Inigo’s hands hung in front of him, petals falling off the stems with every step he took. It wasn’t that he’d meant to get dying flowers, but rather that the dying ones looked so sad on the display when he’d gotten to the store that he knew he had no choice but to get them. He knew his mother would understand why he’d done that, and that she’d forgive his lackluster offering because it meant the flowers had a chance to perform their proper duties. “I can’t believe it’s been a whole year,” Chrom said, walking in stride with his son, Lucina following behind them both. “Sometimes feels like it was just yesterday that she fell ill, and now…”

“I get it, don’t worry.” Grimacing as he looked at his father, Inigo saw that the older man was tearing up at what they were about to do, and he relaxed his expression, not wanting to cause any more pain than being in the graveyard already was going to. “We’ve had to go a year without her, and now we have to remember what we’ve lost just to make sure we don’t forget her.”

“She knows we’d never forget her, that’s not why we’re here.” A hand gestured towards the drooping bouquet, Chrom sounding stern with his words. “Same with the gifts, we didn’t have to come to give her any of those if we didn’t want to. We’re here to spend some time with her, simple as that. You kids will learn to appreciate being able to do this, compared to not even knowing where your parents are buried. It’ll be a slow appreciation, I’m sure, but it’ll happen.”

Inigo looked down at the bouquet, questioning whether or not being part of this was worth it, when he heard Lucina say, “Look, we’re here. Let’s just…spend some time with Mother, whether it’s for remembering or sharing.” She was already kneeling down on the grassy gravesite, a blanket in her hand that she had brought to drape over the grave to give them all somewhere to sit. “Either way, she’ll love the company on such a sunny day.”

“Huh, yeah, it is rather sunny today isn’t it?” Looking up to the bright blue sky, Inigo smiled for a second before turning his focus down to the headstone on the grave, his smile fading as he read over the name and dates far too familiar to his heart. He’d spent so long dwelling over the existence of this very grave, questioning how it could be real and a place that he would forever be drawn to, that he’d honestly forgotten exactly how it looked. Before sitting down next to his sister, he glanced towards his father, seeing that Chrom was mouthing along to reading what he’d personally had inscribed on the headstone, and tried smiling once more at knowing that his father was just as in love with his mother now as he’d ever been.

Once all three of them were seated and the bouquet had been nestled right against the cool exterior of the stone, they took a moment of silence, each of them with closed eyes, focusing on good memories rather than the reality around them. Even when they were done with their moment, they stayed relatively silent, the only time anyone spoke being when they were addressing some kind of thought towards their departed one. Time crawled by slowly as they sat there, nothing else going on all day to try pulling them from what they were doing. As far as their plans were, they were going to spend time there at the gravesite, honoring someone that had meant the world to them when she’d been alive.

But as the day wore on and the sun got to be too much, it was obvious that two of them were anxious to get going. Lucina, having been the first to sit down, ended up being first up, patting the headstone a few times before she walked back towards the car they’d driven over in, and Chrom was quick to follow her, his face reddened from how he’d been allowing himself to cry. “Will you be coming back with us?” he asked Inigo, who hadn’t shifted once since he’d sat down, and he shook his head without looking towards his father. “Ah, I understand. Well, you know how to get home when you’re ready. Lucy and I will see you when you’re done.”

The silence he received was a telling answer, and he excused himself without another word. Inigo waited until he knew his father and sister were long gone before he brought himself to his feet, his legs trembling underneath him as he stood on the plot of land his mother was buried in, preparing himself for what he was about to do. He raised an arm into the air, posing it as if he’d been rehearsing something, before breaking into a carefully-choreographed dance that had him spinning circles on the blanket that had been laid there on the ground. This had been something he’d been practicing since he’d gotten back into dancing, a performance that had no physical audience and was only being done because he felt it was the single best way he could show his love and appreciation for his mother.

She’d been the reason he’d started dancing when he was young, she deserved to have a dance done in her honor when he had the chance to do so. At its conclusion he gave a bow, sweeping the tips of his fingers across the blanket, just to look at the headstone and see that the bouquet, which he hadn’t touched once in his dance, had shifted to being a bit more upright, the flowers appearing almost more lively than they had at the start. “Mother, if you’re here, please tell me how I did,” he said, voice breathy as he was collecting himself from the physical act he’d just done. “Anything’ll do, I just need to know if it was good.”

“Good? It was amazing!” It wasn’t his mother’s voice he was hearing, but at that point any voice was going to send him toppling over, and when he hit the ground he heard Severa laughing behind him. “What, did you really think that no one was going to see that out here? It’s an open field! As long as you’re not behind a monument you can see everything!”

“I though you and your mother were going to be at the mausoleum right now, didn’t think you’d come over here to see me.” Not bothering with picking himself up, Inigo waited until Severa was there to offer him a hand before he started moving. “You should really explain yourself, this was supposed to be a private moment that didn’t have anyone like you intruding on it. I even had my father and Lucina both leave before I did it, and they’re my actual family!”

“I only saw the end, don’t get your panties in a bunch like that.” Pulling Inigo back to his feet whether he liked it or not, Severa looked at him as if she was expecting a thank you, which she didn’t get because he was still flustered that she’d seen any of his dance. “Okay, whatever. You didn’t look half bad doing that, someday you’re going to make a girl love you with those kind of moves and you’re going to hate that you never let anyone watch you before that moment.”

“Thanks, I think? But this dance wasn’t meant for anyone but my mother, and I don’t appreciate that you watched me anyway.” Rolling his eyes, Inigo couldn’t hide the fact that he was enjoying her compliments, and so he pulled himself away from her to go back to looking at his mother’s grave. “You can go now, I know you’re still here at the graveyard and that’s all I need from you.”

Judging by how what he heard come from behind him was a flopping onto the blanket rather than someone walking away, he wasn’t going to get away from her that easy. “You’re funny, Inigo. We’re here for the same reason, just for different people. I’d let you come see where my dad’s ashes, and my sister’s, are stored, why won’t you let me see where your mom’s buried? Think I’m going to desecrate this place? As if.”

“No, somehow I know you’re more respectful and careful than that.” Severa leaned back so that Inigo standing in front of her was blocking the sun from her face, and she sighed contently. “Go on, get back to dancing. Act like I’m not here. I’m quite used to being treated like I don’t exist, you can do it for your own comfort right now.”

It was a tempting offer, but every fiber of Inigo’s being was telling him to reject it because he couldn’t dance knowing someone was there to watch him. “Sorry, Severa, but if you’re going to watch me dance, it’s going to be if I ever get up on a stage like Mother used to. She was rather shy about the whole thing but she could let loose if she was given the chance, and watching her dance across a floor was a sight that no person who saw it would ever forget.”

“Kind of like watching you then, huh?” Her suggestion made him turn to look at her with shock, his mouth moving wordlessly as he tried to come up with a response that suitably expressed how hearing that made him feel. He’d never been on the same level as his mother when it came to dancing; why was she telling him otherwise? “You really don’t think you’re all that great, do you?”

“More like, I have a level of greatness to achieve that I haven’t gotten to yet. Mother’s perfect dancing isn’t quite what I have yet.” Now Inigo was sitting down once more, making sure to avoid touching the headstone or the bouquet in case some kind of spirit was still present. Severa raised an eyebrow at him but didn’t question what he’d just done, although she did unfold one of her legs to kick it out at him, causing him to laugh.

“You know, maybe if you’d listen to me and take what I’m saying seriously, you’d know that you are probably the greatest dancer I know, and yeah, I didn’t know your mom, but so what?” Bringing a finger to her cheek and pressing it up to raise her mouth into a lopsided smile, Severa continued, “What matters here is that someone thinks you’re great and you need to accept that and run with it. You could be making money off of what you’ve got and you’re wasting it on dancing on a grave.”

Hearing this wasn’t what he’d expected the day to become, but a friendly conversation in such a dark place was always welcomed, and so he decided he’d take the bait and go along with it. Whatever it was they found themselves talking about, it was immersive enough that neither of them noticed how late it had started to get, and they were only stopped in their conversation by Cordelia approaching them, her cheeks clearly tear-stained but her head being held high as she walked towards them. Her presence put an end to the talks, but that was no matter—there was always another time, especially since it didn’t look like anything was going to change in their lives anytime soon. For now, and for the foreseeable future, they were stuck as pseudo-siblings, and it was time as always to take advantage of that.

Even if they didn’t like each other every single moment, their paths had become too tangled to ignore that they were each other’s new best friend and partner in crime.

 

**Author's Note:**

> The rest of this story won't be as death-heavy and will (hopefully, if it goes according to plan) end up being a rather cute and fun story about how two kids learn to love and respect each other like somewhat-siblings. but for now I hope everyone likes it! c:


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